


Scientific Heresy

by antigrav_vector



Series: (R)BB fics - all pairings [16]
Category: Captain America (MCU), Iron Man (MCU), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Action, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Canon-Typical Violence, Comic Book Science, Comic Book Violence, Dubious Science, M/M, Mission Fic, Mutual Pining, Time Travel, experiments gone wrong, ignores all canon after IM2, inaccurate history, mashup of canons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-17 18:21:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 34,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13664655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antigrav_vector/pseuds/antigrav_vector
Summary: In the process of running the particle accelerator in his basement and fixing the arc reactor, Tony finds himself flung into the past where he has to take on a fight not his own if he wants to get home to stop Vanko. At least he had a chance to replace the old rector that had been killing him with the new one before everything went sideways... But now he has no choice but to face off with family, friends, and old heroes, and none of that sounds remotely appealing. Well, okay, getting to meet them all during their glory days kinda does.But as it turns out, they're not exactly what he imagined, and his path home is a lot longer than he'd hoped it would be.And a lot more complicated.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Presented with thanks to my beta Jas, and my faithful cheerleader Quarra.
> 
> Art credit for all the embedded lovelies goes to [Riverlander 974](http://riverlander974.tumblr.com/tagged/river-draws). Don't forget to go heap some love on those, too! Credited reblogs are an artist's best friend.
> 
> "Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a 'crank.' " -- [Stephen Hawking](https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/stephen_hawking_627114?src=t_time_travel%0A)

"Congratulations, Sir," JARVIS said. "You've successfully synthesized a new element, and it appears to be stable."

His AI sounded almost proud of him. Tony grinned, elated. "Good. Let's get it installed. Got the new housing ready?"

"Of course, Sir."

It was the work of a few minutes to get the small triangular energy source into the new housing, and close it up securely. Replacing the old palladium powered model was a hell of a relief. It was like a cool drink on a summer day at the beach. The changeover brought his core temperature down slightly since it didn't run hot like the old reactor, and somehow it also felt like it was making his skin tingle with residual power. The taste of copper and coconut that went with it was strange, but not unpleasant.

Interestingly, the glow was almost the same color. It had shifted whiter, as he'd have expected it would. The energy output was a lot higher, and that tended to mean that the light an object emitted was correspondingly more energetic. But the difference was small. Or, the difference in visible wavelengths was, anyway.

"Sir," JARVIS broke into his thoughts, and Tony let his t-shirt fall to cover his torso again, "I believe it may be wise to shut down the particle accelerator. I am detecting a buildup of unstable polarized tachyon particles radiating from it."

Tachyon particles? Tony took a moment to process that statement. "That shouldn't be happening," he muttered and took a step toward the shut-off switch.

Tachyons were time particles, and they weren't fully understood yet. Most models used in particle physics predicted their existence, and a few had been allegedly detected at CERN, but the specifics of how they worked, where they came from, and what they did, exactly, wasn't known. The theories said that they were probably inert, but Tony had no particular desire to fuck around with particles that might very well be worse cancer-causing agents than gamma rays. Not when he didn't know how to protect himself. He might prefer to work on things that didn't require wearing safety gear, but this was critical to his survival.

Before he got to the switch, there was a bright flash that reminded him of the night the arc reactor in L.A. had gone up, and, thinking fast, he reflexively grabbed the handle of his suitcase suit, which happened to be at his feet.

It ought to protect him from whatever radiation was in that flash. He'd kept it close at hand throughout his reactor redesign and the fabrication, just in case he ran out of time and needed it to deal with Vanko, though he'd planned to use the more reinforced suit for that fight if he could get it to accept his new power source without a fuss. He had a feeling he'd need all the firepower he could muster for that showdown.

He only just had enough time to finish the motion. While he bent and his hand closed around the handle of the suit, the bright flash lingered for a few tenths of a second, then resolved into the familiar sensation of being upside-down, and he was suddenly chilled to the bone and falling. He instantly recognized that vague feeling of vertigo and the turbulent wind rushing in his ears. He'd felt it far too many times since he'd created the armour to mistake it.

He oriented himself, using gravity as his guide, and quickly surveyed the area beneath him. A glance down revealed jagged mountains and snow. Lots of both. And a rail line winding through the valleys, but no stations. It would be impossible to determine where he was without GPS. If he survived this fall.

" _Shit_ ," he swore vehemently and keyed his suitcase suit open. It had been designed to be used on a roughly level solid surface, but it should, in theory, work in the air too.

At this point, if it didn't, he was dead.

Piece by piece, the suit locked into place around him, more slowly than it would have on the ground. Tony made a note to redesign that if he survived this. Waiting for each plate to interlock with its neighbors was a kind of agony he hadn't felt since that night he'd fought Obie and his suit had iced over, leaving him plummeting out of control.

The ground was rushing up to meet him, now, and the armour hadn't fully deployed.

With a wince, Tony knew he wouldn't be able to prevent the impact with the ground on... he squinted... on what looked like a train line leading through the Alps, of all places. Most of the other mountain ranges high enough to be this snowy didn't have a lot of train lines through them. That was primarily a Germanic thing.

The helmet and faceplate finally closed when he was about fifteen meters away from the ground, and Tony tried frantically to slow his fall with his repulsors.

Too little, too late. It didn't work.


	2. Chapter 2

Opening his eyes with a groan, Tony had to force down the urge to vomit. Every inch of him hurt with some degree of intensity and he was pretty sure he was concussed, judging by the way his eyes didn't want to focus.

His suit was pretty obviously damaged, going by the lack of the HUD and the silence in his ears. Ordinarily, JARVIS would have been trying his damnedest to wake him when he was in this kind of shape.

Still -- he forced his worry over JARVIS aside as much as he could and focused on taking stock -- he was alive, even if he was facedown on a random mountain somewhere and the suit was starting to cool off. The metal components were impossible to insulate completely, and this suit was too compact to allow him to include heating elements beyond what kept it from icing over. That was why he usually wore the neoprene undersuit.

As he'd seen already, his HUD was down, much as he was, and the interface was dark, as though it had been fried by that bright flash of light, whatever it had been. Feeling like his head was being split down the middle by five guys with pickaxes, Tony forced himself to think back. He couldn't remember, but he thought it hadn't come on in those last instants before he'd hit the ground. If the electronics in his suit had been fried, though, he shouldn't have been able to fire his repulsors at all. It was probably something else.

He didn't dare move his head yet. If he tried to do that the odds were good that he'd vomit after all.

Besides the concussion, he could feel some deep bruises forming all over his body, thanks to the impact. The worst of it was, predictably, over his ribcage, but he was pretty sure he hadn't cracked or broken anything. Given the height of the fall he'd taken and the weaknesses of his body thanks to the reactor, he'd expected some damage there, if nothing else. There might be some internal bleeding, though. That was something he couldn't determine without JARVIS.

The suitcase suit wasn't as good at dispersing those sorts of forces as the fully assembled and much heavier armour he kept in the workshop. The dampening elements in this suit were smaller and weaker than in his primary one. They had to be for this suit to fold up small enough to fit into a suitcase. That meant that, while the primary heavier suit could easily shrug off tank shells, this lighter suit offered him a lot less protection.

Under him, the ground started to tremble, pulling him out of his wandering thoughts. Tony frowned. The Alps -- if that was truly where he'd landed -- weren't prone to earthquakes strong enough to feel. Something was up.

Taking his time to slowly lift himself up out of his prone sprawl and open the faceplate manually, so that he wouldn't have to puke into his armour if moving made the urge impossible to force down, Tony forced himself up onto his elbows. The icy air that hit his face made him flinch. He'd almost forgotten, but it was _cold_ here. Ignoring the way the air seemed to cut at his skin, Tony gingerly lifted his torso up, inch by inch, until he was on his hands and knees. Complementing the icy air he could feel on his face, the cold was starting to seep through the metal of his suit to his clothes and from there to his skin.

In fact, judging by the temperatures, he seemed to have landed in winter... when and wherever he was. If JARVIS really had detected unstable tachyons, he might have ended up displaced in time somehow in addition to the way he'd been sent from Malibu to... wherever he was.

The slight vibration he still felt was intensifying, and that was a bad sign. He still didn't know much of anything about his surroundings, with the way the narrow eye slits of his faceplate had restricted his vision and the concussion had blurred what little he _could_ potentially have seen through them. Even now, with the faceplate open, his sight was not overly helpful. The rails he'd landed on had deformed badly, but better that than the alternative. He would much rather replace some steel than try to heal severe injuries right now.

Everything he could see was in shades of rock grey, wood brown, and steel. Gravel crunched under his knees as he shifted his weight. He could see more, now that the faceplate was open, but there were still no identifying features he could make use of. A glance upwards to the area in front of him wasn't helpful either. The snow covered and obscured everything. He'd have to get to his feet. Somehow.

Shivering convulsively at the idea of shucking the armour entirely, Tony pushed himself up farther until he'd made it to a kneeling position. He stayed there, his breath coming faster and his eyes closed in an attempt to stave off the strong nausea caused by moving. His hands fell to the badly bent rails underneath him automatically in an attempt to stabilize himself, and closing his hands around the metal left his entire upper body screaming. In the haze of pain it was taking a lot longer than normal for his own dazed thoughts to register properly, and what eventually drove the point home was the scream of a train whistle.

A very nearby train whistle.

Reacting in near panic and not inclined to test the suitcase suit against what would hit like a literal freight train, Tony threw himself to his stomach on one side of the rails. His concussion protested the movement violently, leaving him coughing and retching into the gravel, emptying what little was in his stomach to the sounds of said train derailing itself and coming to a screeching, grinding halt. Tony spared a moment to wince for the damage that had to have resulted. This wouldn't be a cheap fix. He'd have to dip into his personal disaster fund and Pepper would verbally flay him.

Long before he'd managed to calm his stomach down, the sounds of fighting on the train reached him. Strange futuristic-sounding noises, shouts, and much more easily recognizable gunfire. Pistols, by the sound of it. Probably 9mm.

None of this made any damned sense. No one would bother hijacking a train in 2010. That hadn't been a thing since the 1800s. But the weaponry he couldn't identify and the train itself sounded way too modern to be from the past. There was no way this was a steam engine. There wasn't enough smoke, and there was no way those weapons belonged in the 1800s.

Maybe he'd ended up in the future.

Tony forced his eyes open. After a few seconds his sight cleared just enough for him to make out a blur of blue, white and red leaping from one train car to another. It vanished before he could bring it into focus and left him more bewildered than before. What the actual fuck had that been? Was he seeing things?

No one seemed to be paying the least attention to him, so far, and that was probably for the best. Taking that reprieve for what it was, Tony ignored the proceedings, more interested in getting his bearings and getting his legs back under him than intervening in what was apparently a train robbery.

If he couldn't defend himself, he wouldn't be able to deal with whoever was on that train, should they decide he was a threat.

A few more minutes passed -- Tony wasn't sure how many -- and the sounds of the strange rayguns subsided slowly. Tony spent the time gradually getting back to his feet. About the time he managed, the blur he'd seen earlier jumped down onto the gravel and approached him, resolving into a person as whoever it was got into conversational range.

Tony recognized the guy with no little shock. "Well, fuck me."

Captain America raised an eyebrow at him, which was impressive given the cowl and helmet he was wearing. "Careful. That kind of talk could get you in trouble," he commented mildly, audibly amused, before his tone went harder. "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

Tony thought fast. Or, well, tried to. His concussion and the headache that went with it interfered. "Call me Tony," he managed, closing his eyes and swallowing hard against the way his gorge tried to rise again. "The rest of that information is classified."

Cap watched him for a long moment in silence. Tony could feel it, even if he couldn't see it. "You're injured, aren't you."

"Concussion," Tony admitted. "Some bad bruises. Pretty sure that's all, though."

"Hey, Cap," someone called in another voice Tony recognized. This time he was less stunned by the shock of recognition. A beat later, Tony heard another pair of feet hit the gravel and the crunches as the new guy walked over.

"What'cha got there," the new guy went on. "Another experiment of Zola's? Some HYDRA robot?"

Cap huffed. "Doubt it. His accent's New York through and through. I'm inclined to bring him back to Phillips, though. We can't waste time babysitting strays right now. There's no time for that."

Zola? Phillips? Tony winced. Ohhh man, he was in such deep shit. He knew exactly when and where he was now. And what he'd inadvertently changed. "I'm no stray," he rasped, opening his eyes again to see Barnes watching him warily. "And I'm not going back with you."

Cap's jaw set stubbornly. "And why not?" He asked, his tone low and dangerous. "You need medical attention, we can't leave you here, and we can't take you with us on our next mission."

"Because _you can't make me_." Tony told him, knowing that would probably only make things worse. But it was true nonetheless. All he had to do was wait for an opportunity and fly away from them. They wouldn't be able to follow or track him.

"We'll see about that. Buck, keep an eye on him. I'm gonna check on the others."

Tony took a moment to let it sink in that he was back in '44 and had just fallen ass-first into one of Cap's last few missions in his crusade to take out the Red Skull and Hitler. Jesus fucking Christ on a bicycle. Of all the time points for him to land in.

"How'd you find us, anyway?" Barnes demanded. "This mission was so secret only Phillips and Carter knew about it. And what are you wearing?"

Tony rubbed at his forehead carefully with one armoured hand and outright ignored the question about his armour. "I didn't. Crashed. Happened to be in the wrong place and wrong time."

"Why don't you want to come back with us? Dugan's not a half bad field medic." Barnes tried to reason with him. "And I asked you what you were wearing."

He couldn't. Couldn't face the specter of his dad. Couldn't let them pry him out of his armour and find out that the arc was part of him. Couldn't let them try to take it. Or experiment on him. He was an anomaly even in his own time, and that effect would only be more extreme here.

Even if none of that came to pass, even if he managed to keep everything under wraps, he'd have very little time or opportunity to find a way back home. Either he'd be under watch constantly, or 'recruited' to help the war effort -- or possibly both -- and either one of those eventualities would interfere with his plans. He needed to get back. To stop Vanko and Hammer.

"Got my reasons," he said after a slightly drawn out pause. "Can't say anything."

Barnes looked suspicious, but accepted that. More or less. "'M not sure I believe you," he said bluntly, "but Cap seems to think you're more or less on the up-and-up, and his instincts for these sorts of things are generally pretty good."

A silence fell between them, then. It wasn't exactly tense, but it wasn't companionable, either. They watched as Cap rallied the rest of the Commandos and got them moving.

Turned out they'd have to hike a good thirty klicks through the mountains to reach their pick-up point since there was nowhere else for a plane to land anywhere near enough them to be useful. It was almost tempting to suggest calling for a helicopter, but taking a helicopter into the Alps, even a military one, was just asking to crash with the way the unpredictable up- and down-drafts could slam you against a mountainside without warning. And, anyway, they were only ever used in the Pacific Theatre, if he was remembering correctly. [[wikipedia link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter#Early_development)]

Once Cap's attention had landed on them, the Howling Commandos had quickly regrouped. They'd secured Zola and the few remaining conscious HYDRA goons, then hustled them and Tony away from the crashed train and the rail line. They needed to find a place to set up camp and have their evening meal, after all. In the process, they'd all automatically fallen into their accustomed roles.

Tony watched them with a weird mix of awe and envy. These were the men his dad had held up as paragons of pretty much everything good in humanity. And simultaneously described as the most destructive force on the battlefield. Dugan, the field medic with the ability to get the rest of them to hold still long enough to get treated. Falsworth, the radioman with an uncanny knack for getting a clear signal even in the worst terrain. Morita, the man they trusted to work miracles with the quartermasters. Gabe, who could and would steal and drive anything. Dernier, the explosives expert and pyromaniac. And leading this motley crew, Barnes, sniper extraordinaire, and Rogers, expert tactician.

The way his dad had liked to tell it, the sun shone out of their collective asses, and they never lost a fight without going back for seconds and destroying their opposition.

It had always sounded too good to be true, but the history books had backed his dad up neatly, so Tony had kept his doubts behind his teeth.

Now, it seemed, he might get a chance to make his own decision on the matter.

While they'd set up the overnight camp, about three klicks later, no one had been watching him. Tony took in the scene while he still could; he knew he'd want to remember this, once he managed to get home.

Once the Howlies decided it was time to stop for the night, things happened fast. It was kind of impressive to watch. In the span of about five minutes, they had their prisoners settled in a small knot, a fire laid, and were heating tin mugs of what passed for coffee out here.

Morita stood, his eyes closed in a moment of rest, to one side of the small smokeless fire that crackled quietly at his comrades' feet. Dugan and Falsworth were perched on a fallen log, talking quietly about something Tony couldn't quite make out, but they seemed to be more or less content with the way things were going. There was almost no tension in their faces or their shoulders. Sitting on his packs so that he didn't have to plant his ass in the snow, Dernier picked out a spot beside the fire and wrapped his hands around his mug of coffee while Gabe kept an eye on their captives. Cap and Barnes were a few meters away, holding a map and discussing something quietly. Not wanting their prisoners to overhear them planning, no doubt.

That left the Commandos' attention more firmly fixed on the confirmed hostiles than on him, so, knowing he had maybe a minute or so -- at best -- to make his move, Tony had flipped his faceplate closed and walked a few steps away from the half-finished camp. Once he'd broken the line of sight, he'd hit his thrusters and sent himself soaring up through the tree branches, knowing that they would hear and see him leave. There was nothing for it, though.

He still had no HUD, so he had to fly manually, but he didn't really give a fuck about that. And, sure, manual flight was made a bit more complicated by the bruising that was making moving difficult, the concussion and the lingering slight distortion of his vision, but he knew how his armour handled. He could fly it injured, blind, or without JARVIS' help. He'd be fine.

It took him an hour or so, flying far more slowly than he was accustomed, but he found a hiker's cabin that he could hole up in for the evening.

Tony stumbled in, closed the door, and shucked the armour. It felt great to be rid of it, despite the icy air inside the cabin, and Tony groaned in an approximation of relief. He should be secure enough here for the time being. The number of people that knew he was even in this time numbered less than twenty. Granted, even one was bad enough, considering who those people were, but he couldn't do anything about it.

That said, he was free of them now, so what effect he might have on history should be minimal.

Refocusing on the present, Tony knew he'd need a heat source and something to eat, and he'd need them soon. He'd be risking frostbite if he tried to sleep in this cabin in the clothes he was wearing without some form of warmth. He'd been dressed to work in the 'shop in Malibu, which left him in an t-shirt and torn jeans. Not an ideal combination for winter in the highest mountains of Europe.

A glance around the tiny dimly lit space revealed roughly what he had expected. A tiny wood stove to heat the single room, a stack of wood and kindling, a sink and toilet in a bathroom about one meter by two, a cot to sleep on, and no blankets.

At least it was warmer than being outside, even with the stove unlit. The light wind had made him shiver hard enough to rattle his teeth minutes after he'd taken to the air and matters had not improved until he'd spotted the roof of this tiny building nestled in between the trees.

It took him a bit of searching to get his hands on a striker, but once he did, the stove lit readily, as though it had been waiting for him to show up. Tony gratefully stood in front of it, shivering and warming his hands as he tried to figure out what he could find in this little shack that was safe to eat.

He was no hunter, after all. Didn't know how to track animals or what plants were edible up here in the mountains, let alone where to dig through the snow to find any of said plants or how to clean and cook said animals if he did get lucky and catch one.

There was nothing to be found in the cabin, either. He waited until the air had warmed a little before he stepped away from the stove to search the place. There was a minimal first aid kit in one of the few cabinets and some ancient and half-used toiletries in the other, but he found nothing edible.

After giving up on scrounging food, Tony groaned and laid himself down on the bed in the slowly warming room. Might as well get some rest while he could. He wouldn't be getting dinner tonight, and he knew it. The only way for him to achieve that would have been to keep flying until he found a town, but that implied a lot of hazards. Flying in the dark was difficult enough, when you knew your way. He'd be attempting to do it in unknown territory, without the benefit of a map or GPS. And even worse, he'd be attempting to navigate through the mountains, because he didn't dare fly too high and risk not seeing the unlit buildings, which would leave him vulnerable to ramming himself into the side of the mountains he was trying to fly between. Not to mention that trying to look for a town and fly at the same time would be tough enough during the day when everything was buried under literal meters of snow.

He was better off staying right where he was for the night, even with his injuries and the lack of food or water.

Maybe, in retrospect, he should have let the Commandos feed him. That might have been worth having to stay with them for another 12 hours. He would have found another chance to leave, eventually.

With a pained grunt, he hauled the bed close to the stove, wanting to be warm as soon as possible, and for as long as possible, then settled back with a sigh. What he needed was to get his HUD back online.

He had to find money, painkillers, food, and tools, in that order.

But, first, he told himself, he needed some sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

He woke several times to the feeling of cold air seeping in through the badly-insulated door and windows of the tiny shack when the stove went out. Shivering and hungry, he'd stoked it back up each time, and then gone back to sleep. That'd had the benefit of making sure he didn't simply drift off forever, but on the other hand, it had definitely made his bruises protest loudly. The symptoms of his concussion had gone down a little more every time he woke, too, much to his relief.

He made a somewhat abortive attempt to plan out his next move early the next morning. He'd woken up just as the sun was rising and the found he couldn't get back to sleep, thanks to the way his stomach was growling at him and trying to wrap itself around his spine, complaining about how empty it was.

He ignored it as best he could.

The thing was that, even if he could get to Zürich, or New York, he had no way to get into his father's bank account. Not a legal one, anyway. And the bankers the world over were sticklers for paperwork. Always had been. Getting to Zürich would be simple enough, after all. He could simply fly there. The suitcase armour wasn't meant for long haul flights like his heavier one, but it would do in a pinch, and Tony was pretty sure this qualified as a pinch.

Before he got any farther in his analysis of the situation, someone banged on the door of the shack. Tony eyed the door warily and said nothing. That was unlikely to be some camper that had rented the place. It was deep winter and no one hiked in those conditions that could help it.

That was more probably someone with a reason to be out here. So, strike force. And more likely to be Axis than Allied.

Or, worse, HYDRA.

Whoever it was banged on the door again. "Open up! We know you're in there!"

Tony wanted to groan. He recognized that voice. Damn the man. Somehow Cap had tracked him here after all. And, worse, also decided it was worth the effort of coming after him. He growled a string of curses under his breath and forced himself to his feet. Opening the door left him face to face with the man, whose cheeks were bright red with the cold. Barnes stood behind Cap, glaring at him and Tony both.

"Well, get your stubborn asses inside," Tony grumbled at them after a frozen moment. He shivered and wrapped one arm tentatively around his middle. "You've come this far. Don't let all the heat out."

Looking somewhat mollified by this, Barnes more or less shoved the Cap bodily through the door then closed it firmly behind them.

The room was a lot colder than it had been, and Tony kind of resented that. He piled a bit more wood on the small fire. The silence in the shack was only broken by the crackle of the flames and Barnes' sniffling, for a while.

"Gonna tell me how you found me?" Tony asked them after a few long tense minutes.

Barnes snorted. "Wasn't exactly hard to figure out. This is the only shelter for miles around that isn't a cave dug in the snow. Which is a task you didn't have the tools for, and this hut was clearly occupied. No other tracks around it except some that appear out of thin air near the door. No one who coulda pulled that off but you."

Cap nodded. "Gonna tell us why you bolted?"

Tony debated how to answer that, watching the pair of them carefully. He hadn't expected them to come after him, but it made a kind of sense. They couldn't just leave a rogue element like him unaccounted for. After a beat he replied, "And what happens if you don't like the answer? Going to use force to get what you want?"

There was another silence on the heels of that demand. Tony thought Cap looked a bit taken aback, but he couldn't be sure, thanks to the concussion.

"Only if you leave me no other choice," Cap answered slowly. "I don't know who you are or what you want. I don't know where you came from or who you work for. You know who we are, though. It shows in your eyes and your reactions."

Tony gave in to the urge to rub at the bridge of his nose, ducking his head and wrapping his opposite hand around his elbow, but didn't respond to any of Cap's not-questions. "And where is the rest of your team?"

"Escorting our prisoners back to HQ," Barnes replied evenly. "And if you don't start talkin', you're gonna join them."

Cap help up a hand and Barnes backed down a little. "Here," Cap told Tony, digging in his tiny pack and then holding out an MRE style ration. "You skipped dinner yesterday. And breakfast this morning, I'll bet."

Tony eyed it for a beat, not sure whether he wanted to accept the bribe. And not sure whether his dislike of being handed things would overcome his hunger. His stomach growled loudly, though, earning him an amused snort from Barnes.

It took him another few seconds, but Tony managed to make himself take the ration. He masked the hesitation with a put-upon sigh. "What is it? Beans and toast?"

Barnes sniffed. "Nah. American rations ain't got that British slop in 'em."

Opening the ration revealed some slightly soggy pasta, a bit of broccoli, and some tough bits of pork. Dessert was a handful of M&Ms. It wasn't much, but it was food. He dug in, feeling the others' eyes on him, the whole time, and hating it. At least it had all still been sealed, and he was reasonably sure it hadn't been tampered with.

After he'd eaten, Tony had to admit he felt a lot better. His head still felt like someone was trying to split it open with an ice pick, but he was warmer and, well, not exactly energized, but less apt to fall back onto the cot in a mix of defeat and bodily weakness. His thoughts still felt a bit fuzzy, but thankfully that was slowly clearing.

When he set the empty MRE container aside, Cap caught his eyes. "So," he said quietly.

Tony's instincts perked up; the man sounded like he was debating courses of action, some possibly including violence. Warily, he echoed, "So?"

Barnes sniffed at him and Tony belatedly realised that the Sergeant had moved to stand between him and the door. "So, spill."

Tony gave him a sardonic look. He wasn't that dumb. Or that trusting. Not even when he couldn't seem to focus for long periods of time. "What're you gonna offer me in return? Information doesn't come free."

That shut Barnes up for a moment.

"What will it cost us?" Cap asked, turning his question back on him.

Tony considered him for a minute in return. "First of all, your silence on who I am and where I'm from."

He carefully didn't bring up the 'when' yet. He'd have to test the waters a little before he dropped that little bomb on them. Odds were very high that they wouldn't believe a word he said if he led with that little detail.

Cap nodded. "Fine. Your other conditions?"

That reaction to his first demand caught Tony off guard. He hadn't expected the Cap to agree so quickly to that one. It made sense, though, considering Cap's own identity had been classified right from the moment he'd joined the military until his death. The man was already intimately familiar with the need to keep who he was under wraps and the potential consequences of letting it slip. Cap probably wanted to know why Tony felt the need to hide his identity. He nodded slowly and continued, "Alright. The others? I've got two; the suit? That stays with me. No exceptions. No analysis. No arguments."

Barnes looked unsurprised. "And the last one?"

Tony had to swallow against the surge of memory and reflexive fear as he tapped at the arc reactor in his chest, drawing attention to the way it glowed through his thin excuse for a shirt. "The same restrictions apply to this. That's the most important of my conditions. You say no to this one, and I say nothing at all."

"What is it?" Cap looked caught between horror, disgust, and curiousity.

"That I can't tell you. But it keeps me alive, so you'll excuse me if I'm a bit protective of it. Anyone tries to mess with it, they'll be facing me in the suit. Including you." Tony couldn't help the way his fingers nervously tapped against the reactor housing. He hadn't had a chance to grab much in the way of clothes before he'd taken off last night, much less anything thick and heavy enough to hide the glow.

Cap shrugged. "Fine, we'll agree to your conditions. Ours are similar. Our names and faces can't get out. Nor that we were in the region when that train derailed. Our missions are top secret for a reason."

Tony nodded. "Fair."

Barnes looked like he wanted to protest the decision, but didn't quite dare, caught between his obedience to the chain of command in the field and his own curiousity.

"Well, Sergeant?" Tony prompted Barnes.

Barnes growled something under his breath that Tony suspected would have pissed him the fuck off if he could have made out the words, then nodded. "I'll accept the terms."

Tony relaxed a little, then hissed as his bruises ached sharply due to the movement. "Alright. What do you want to know, then? Besides the obvious."

"Let's start there," Barnes said, his voice betraying his irritation with his Captain and his lingering suspicion about Tony. "Then we'll see."

Knowing that he wouldn't get any trust if he didn't extend some of his own, Tony carefully pieced together what he could tell them without giving away too much and what he couldn't.

"You've already guessed I'm American," he said slowly, "but what you don't know is that I'm not here by choice. I had some trouble with my armour and then crashed. Unfortunately, I crashed right into the middle of your secret mission. That wasn't my idea."

Barnes snorted. "For argument's sake, I'll accept that for now. But why'd you crash? That fancy suit of yours get hit by lightning or something?"

"Something like that. I do remember seeing a bright flash before I fell," Tony agreed, and it was even the God's honest truth.

"So how did you survive that high a fall?" Cap wanted to know. "We spotted you higher in the air than any person could fall and live without serious injuries, at the very least."

"The concussion and bruises not severe enough injuries for you, Captain?" Tony shot back pointedly, "They'll slow me down for a while, that's for sure."

"So you said we couldn't tell anyone who you are. That implies you're gonna tell _us_ ," Barnes changed the topic.

"Truthfully, I'm not sure I should." Tony said and rubbed at his forehead to try to stave off the returning headache. That comment got him renewed suspicious looks from both of them. "But," he went on, "I know I'm not getting out of this without telling you. So. My name's Anthony Stark, and yes, I'm related to your Stark, no, I'm not telling you how."

That lightened the suspicion a bit. "Would he tell us?" Cap asked, his tone more thoughtful than anything.

Barnes huffed. "Doubt that, Steve. Stark's cagey as a spy at the best of times, and he clams right up about his family."

Tony hadn't known that about his dad, but it was working in his favor now, so he said nothing about it.

Cap gave his bestie a half-smile, and conceded the point. He turned back to Tony. "Well, now I know why you said your name had to stay secret," Cap said, leaning back against the wall of the tiny cabin, where he stood beside the door and crossing his wrists at his waist, "but it tells me nothing about your motivations, your intentions towards us or the Commandos, or much of anything else. All it tells me is that you're _probably_ not a spy, yourself. I'd accuse you of lying about your name, but the family resemblance is pretty clear, luckily for you."

"True, he does have Stark's look about him." Barnes said, eyeing him.

Tony wanted to sigh. He was being haunted by his dad, even in this time and even though no one knew their relationship. Hell, he hadn't even met his dad and the guy was causing trouble for him. Then again, he was pretty sure he didn't want to risk meeting Howard in this time. That encounter was probably not going to go well, if and when it happened, and who knew how much it would change the course of history. "My motivations are simple, Captain," Tony answered the question after the silence had drawn out for a few seconds. "I want to get home. If you're willing to help me achieve that, I'll help you on towards your own goals, as I can. I don't have any intentions toward you or your Commandos except to interfere as little as possible. You tell me that your mission here can't get out; mine can't either, and the chances of that happening increase the longer I'm around you and your merry band."

Tony knew the two of them said something in reply to those words, but he got distracted by the concussion and the way it felt like it was scrambling his thoughts. The words, whatever they were, got lost in a brief haze of static.

"Tony?" Cap's voice got through the daze, and he sounded concerned.

Scrunching his eyes closed and pinching at the bridge of his nose, Tony forced himself to focus as best he could. "What?"

"You need to sit down?"

That was more solicitous than any US Military affiliated person ought to be toward someone they'd captured, Tony reflected even as he firmed his stance and shook his head. "I'm fine. You were saying?"

He could see that neither of them believed him, but they let him have his façade.

"Where is 'home'?" Cap said, with the air of a man repeating a question verbatim.

"New York," he told them, "as you've already guessed."

Barnes eyed him briefly. "There's something about that, that you're not telling us."

"You'll think I'm crazy," Tony said simply. "The answer to that happens to be a pretty impossible one."

"Oh? Try us." Barnes waved that excuse away. "After what we've seen on these missions against HYDRA, I'm not sure anything's impossible, anymore."

Tony shrugged. "Well, I'm not from this time. I should be in the year 2010, and stopping someone who's out to destroy me and my company. I'm here because I was trying to fix this," he tapped at the arc reactor, "and my solution to the problem landed me here by accident."

Barnes gaped at him a little. "Okay, that does sound crazy."

"Buck, remember the armour he had on him, though. That tech looks ridiculously futuristic," Cap pointed out, "rather than magic or tesseract powered. Even if that light of his glows the right color for it to be the logical conclusion."

That made Barnes suspicious again, and he insisted on hearing the story again from the beginning. Trying to catch Tony out in a lie, no doubt.

"Look," Tony said with a scowl after they'd been through the parts of his story that he was willing to tell for the second time -- or maybe it was the third; he wasn't sure. In any case, he was getting sick of repeating it. "I really don't care if you believe me or not. All I want is to get home. I have a Russian maniac to stop."

In the face of that more or less calm statement, Cap finally gave in. "Alright, fine. I still don't believe it, but I'll let it ride for the moment. Get your armour on. We're leaving."

That order ended in a fight over their little chain of command and how it should look that took them a good 15 minutes to resolve, and left them all fuming for a while afterwards.


	4. Chapter 4

The trip they made was an awkward one; at first Cap and Sarge had tried to force Tony to hike through the deep snow with them. Tony made a face at them, knowing that it wouldn't be visible through his faceplate, and very pointedly suggested that he fly somewhere and meet them there. "My armour isn't designed for walking anywhere, and I don't have the gear to take it off and hike through the snow," he said.

"Fat chance. You're coming with us." Barnes vetoed that outright, clearly believing that Tony would make another break for freedom. Tony couldn't say that it wasn't tempting, either. He'd never tolerated open hostility that he didn't have to, and Barnes' constant suspicion was really grating on Tony's last fraying nerve. He was tired, hungry, injured, and so far from home he was in another century. The last thing he wanted to deal with was unnecessary bullshit.

Luckily for Barnes, Cap interceded before that could become a repetition of the "you can't give me orders" argument they'd had before leaving the hikers' cabin. "Come on, Buck, let's at least hear him out."

Tony popped his faceplate and caught Barnes' eyes. "You don't trust me, and you don't like me," he said bluntly, "but that's okay because I don't give two fucks about your opinion of me." (Well, okay, he admitted to himself, that bit was a partial lie, but he went on.) "If I'd wanted to run, I could have put on the armour, knocked you both unconscious, and left you in the snow to freeze."

The way Barnes and the Cap put themselves reflexively shoulder to shoulder wasn't lost on Tony. Those two had had each others' backs for decades, and it showed.

After a beat, Cap broke the silence. "So will you?"

Tony made a despairing noise. "I always thought you were smarter than that. Think for half a second, if you can. I have two options: go with you, and hope like hell everyone takes your word for it that I'm not a spy, and you can keep me from ending up in a cell somewhere... Or strike out on my own and hope I can beg, borrow, or steal food, clothes, a workshop, tools, and whatever else I need to get back home. Frankly, both of those options are shit and likely to get me killed or worse, but of the two, this is the better one."

Barnes' eyes narrowed. "You think we'd let you get killed or tortured? You have no faith in us at all."

Tony laughed bitterly. "If you got orders to hand me over, would you do it? If Phillips ordered you to let his scientists put me on a table and cut me open to get at this?" Tony tapped at the arc reactor again. "If Patton gave the order? Or Churchill? Just how much of the Allied Command do you think you can gainsay? If they think they can get some kind of strategic advantage out of it, they'll do it, and to hell with what you have to say."

"That might be true of the Krauts," Bucky argued, "but the Allies? You're nuts."

"History says otherwise," Tony told him simply. "And, no, I'm not telling you about it."

"Why should be we believe those accusations if you refuse to substantiate them," Cap pointed out, audibly forcing his voice to stay more or less level.

"Why shouldn't you, is the better question," Tony riposted. "Think back a bit, Captain, can't you think of a few things you went through that might be considered unethical?" That was hinting at things he knew about Project Rebirth, and Tony knew he shouldn't give away that he knew that, but he was just _done_ with their bullshit.

Predictably, Cap gave him a long look. "I don't know what you're implying."

"Nevermind, then." Closing his faceplate again, Tony forcibly ended the discussion. "Give me a rendezvous point. I'm not walking another step."

Thankfully for his sanity, Cap nodded and pulled a map out of some pocket. It took them some more arguing to settle on a place and time that all three of them could accept.

\------

Their meeting place was most of the way down the mountain they were on, and Tony was personally a bit skeptical that the two of them could make that strenuous hike in the time they'd left one another, but he didn't point that out.

He himself could make the trip in minutes, and would, once the rendezvous time approached. For the time being, he was staying put in the warmth of the cabin. He could probably jet off to scavenge some supplies and come back in the time he had, but he wouldn't put it past them to somehow figure out he'd done so and level some more accusations at him. And if he jetted off again as he had the first time, Tony had no doubt that they would simply track him down again. He was far from inconspicuous in his armour, after all. And if they had to go after him a second time, they would be justifiably pissed off at him. Especially Barnes.

It simply wasn't worth the aggravation that he knew would follow.

Instead, Tony sighed and put his mind to attempting to get JARVIS back online. The armour had sophisticated diagnostics, and the onboard copy of his AI was designed to be able to tolerate stand-alone mode, if necessary.

Four hardware reboots, five software restarts, and two discovered loose contacts fixed with the equivalent of spit and electrical tape later, he had his HUD and JARVIS back.

"Sir?" The AI sounded bewildered. "Why am I unable to connect to the Stark Industries satellite network?"

Tony huffed, "What's the last thing you remember, JARV?"

"I..." There was a slight pause, a hesitation. "A bright flash of light."

A bit more literal than his AI usually was, but he could deal with that. Tony nodded. "Right. So that flash sent me back in time with the suitcase suit. We're in 1944 and got picked up by Captain America and his Commandos. I'm rendezvousing with two of them further down the mountain in a few hours. Meantime, we need to try to figure out how to get me home. Think you can do that? Oh and we'll need to start recording everything."

Making the trip to the rendezvous point a few hours later left Tony sitting on a rock in the woods at the base of the mountain, where two snowed-over hiking paths met, with a bit of time to think on his hands. He spent it continuing to work on the problem of getting home, now that he had access to his HUD and his AI again.

He and JARVIS had more or less worked out the frequency and polarity of those tachyon particles that had landed him in this mess, but they needed better instrumentation to work with than what was built into the suit. The onboard detectors he had access to were simply not quite sensitive enough. When he'd designed them, he'd been working under the assumption that he'd always have access to JARVIS via the satellite network. Which, he now had learned the hard way, might not always hold true.

Tony made a face at his HUD and closed down his latest set of simulations with a sigh when the intrepid duo appeared. He hadn't made much progress and would have preferred to keep working, but that wasn't an option, now. The pair, looking wet and bedraggled but way more attractive than they had a right to, waded up to him through the knee-deep snow. Barnes, luckily for all of them, merely looked surprised that he was there but didn't comment. Cap nodded at him. "Ready to move on?"

"You could save us all a lot of trouble and just tell me where this HQ of yours is, you know," Tony pointed out, putting up his faceplate in the hopes that seeing his face might help convince them of his sincerity.

"True," Cap conceded, "but that's classified and you have no clearances."

"If you take me there, I'll know where it is." Tony tried again, hoping logic and reason might work as a strategy.

Barnes made a sound that approximated a groan and scrubbed at his face with his hands. "Maybe so, but at that point you're Phillips' problem."

Tony growled at Barnes, not quite under his breath, then retorted, "We've been over that. I'm not inclined to trust myself to Phillips or anyone else in command. I barely trust _you_ not to lead me right into a trap. For all I know you're just humouring me and you still think I'm some demon spawn creature that Schmidt summoned with his glowing blue cube."

Cap stared at him, suspicious. "How do you know about the cube?"

Oh. Fuck. Tony winced. "I'm from the future, remember?"

"Then you can tell us how this war goes. How it ends," Barnes said, and it wasn't a question.

Tony wanted to blow something up. Now he was in trouble. "I could tell you how it ended in the previous timeline," he conceded. "But it's already going differently."

Actually. Thinking back, and trying to remember what had happened between that mission of the Commandos' that he'd literally fallen ass-first into and Cap's death... Tony felt his brow wrinkle as he fought to call up the memory and failed. He couldn't remember. How had Cap died, again? What he'd known intimately for years before he'd arrived here was suddenly oddly hazy and indistinct.

"What do you mean?" Cap asked after a short pause, breaking back into Tony's thoughts.

"I _mean_ that there is at least one major thing that happened during this mission of yours in my timeline, that hasn't now, because I'm here." Tony gave him a sardonic look. "Keep up."

"What is that?" Barnes challenged him, "Or are you going to refuse to tell us that, too? You keep making these vague statements that are supposed to convince us to do some things or not to do others, and then don't give us anything to actually work with. To evaluate."

"Well, fine. But don't say I didn't warn you, if this shit goes sideways." Tony turned to Cap so he could hold the man's eyes before he went on, his tone deadly serious. "In my timeline, you got Zola on this mission, like you did yesterday. But only after Barnes, here, somehow fell off the side of that train and down into the ravine. That little tumble ended in his death. I don't know the details of that. They were never declassified. But this time, things happened differently: the train stopped short of that bridge because it derailed... which it wouldn't have if I hadn't fallen onto the tracks and twisted them out of true."

Cap made a strange kind of strangled noise, probably at the thought of his best friend dying, but Tony went on, implacably.

"After that, from what I can gather, you went off on some kind of grief-fueled revenge rampage with the rest of your team and wiped 90% of HYDRA off the map. I'm pretty sure you'd have gotten the rest too, if shit hadn't gone wrong and gotten _you_ killed, as well. I don't know what happened there, either, for the same reasons, but..." Tony shrugged. "My personal opinion is that after Barnes bought it you went suicidal."

Hearing that had made Barnes go pale, in his turn, and he swallowed hard. Clearing his throat, he said, still a little hoarsely, "I need to think."

"You do that," Tony said coldly, knowing he probably sounded more than a little pissed, again. "I'm only telling you this because it's already probably changed beyond recognition, now that I've unintentionally interfered."

At least that had gotten their attention.

Tony watched them struggle to process what he'd told them, not really caring that they were having a difficult time with that and delaying their own departure. He was no pushover; if someone tried to shove him into a corner, he shoved back. Sure, he'd idolized these two growing up, but they weren't at all what he'd imagined.

Maybe there was some truth to the opinion that no one should ever meet their heroes. Heroes were still people, and Tony was well aware that he should know that better than most.

And yet... having his image of the Cap and Sarge shatter to dust was deeply unsettling. Tony watched them sit, shoulder-to-shoulder, at the tiny cookfire they'd decided they could allow themselves, silently reassuring one another that they were alive and in one piece.

\------

"You know," Cap broke the silence between them a few hours later, as they bedded down for the night, "if the future has changed, now that you're here, we have no way of proving what you told us true or false, and neither do you."

Tony had to concede the truth of that. "Probably."

Cap raised an eyebrow at him. "So tell us something from the past that won't have changed."

"For fuck's sake," Tony rolled his eyes. "Fine. You're leaving me no real option, here, so I guess I'll tell you your own history. Not much else I could tell you that you'd believe. And, before you ask: yes, some of this is still classified in my time, but that's not relevant to the discussion. Now, here's what you want to know."

There, Tony paused and fixed them both with a dark look, knowing that that would get their full attention. "I know that sometime last year you got yourself accepted to Project Rebirth. They took you despite -- or maybe because of -- all your medical issues, and managed to fix all of them. It's still not really known how or why the process worked. Not fully. Erskine was killed the same day he transformed you, and the knowledge was lost with him. After that, you toured the country for a while, selling war bonds, before they finally sent you across the Atlantic, where you found a way to go AWOL to rescue Barnes, here, who'd been taken by HYDRA. In the process of carrying out said rescue, you got your team of Commandos together. It took a few weeks to convince the brass to let you, but then you all started tearing a swath through the Germans and HYDRA."

Barnes stared at him. "How do you know all that?"

"Some of it from family and friends, some thanks to my clearances back in my own time, some of it from the history books. Which, I guess, will read a little differently when I get home."

Cap gave him a weirdly helpless look, then shrugged and offered, "At least you'll have a hand in rewriting them?"

Cold comfort, that. "I'd rather be influencing how things are going in my own time."


	5. Chapter 5

It took them another day to catch up to the rest of the Commandos, and then another two to finally reach the base Cap had told him about. Located in southern France, not far from the Swiss border or the ocean, it was tucked away in a relatively remote part of the Massif Central, near the borders of what his suit's (far more modern) maps designated as Vercors National Park. [[wikipedia link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vercors_Regional_Natural_Park)]

Actually catching up to the Commandos and their prisoners had been somewhat anticlimactic. Dugan had taken one look at his Captain and Sergeant, huffed out an irritated "Finally," and gone back to making sure his charges kept walking. The rest of the team had been similarly unimpressed, and generally acted like it had been a foregone conclusion that Cap and Barnes would bring him back to heel. Tony kind of resented it.

When they stopped for a midday meal, such as it was, that had been when the friction started up again.

"Alright, Tony, out of the armour," Barnes demanded, while Cap kept a watchful eye on the others as they got their prisoners seated in a small semi-circle.

Tony balked. The absolute _last_ thing he wanted was for Zola to see that the arc reactor was part of him rather than the suit. Not even for a moment. "No way, pal. You're not my commanding officer. I don't answer to you." 

Gabe laughed. "Hey Barnes, you gonna take that?"

Dernier sniggered. Dugan rolled his eyes and jumped in before Barnes could answer. "He even got any winter gear on under that tin can?"

Seizing the excuse gratefully, Tony turned to Dugan and shrugged as best he could. "I don't. So unless you've got spares somewhere, I'll take my chances in my tin can, thanks. I don't want frostbite." The idea of shedding his armour, of losing his connection to JARVIS, for the duration of the trip was kind of terrifying. The idea of walking the remaining who knew how many miles in boots that were guaranteed not to fit well and highly likely to give him who knew what foot fungus was almost as bad.

His hopes got dashed when Cap nodded decisively. "Morita, you're about the same size as Tony. You got anything you can lend him?"

Morita looked doubtful. "It's not winter-weight on its own, but I've got a spare pair of fatigues."

"I'd need boots, too," Tony put in, trying to ensure he could keep his armour on just because they couldn't find him any suitable gear. "I didn't exactly come dressed for a hike in this weather."

Barnes growled, clearly seeing through the tactic, but unable to argue the point.

Falsworth, a hint of a smirk tugging at his lips, offered, "If you layer a few pairs of fatigues, it ought to work. But I'm not sure we can dig up a pair of boots."

At least that approach would let him hide the reactor. "Then I'm not taking off the suit."

Cap was sizing him up in a way that was making Tony's hindbrain scream in a mix of anticipation and fear. That expression fell somewhere between promising as hell and dangerous as fuck. And it was damned attractive. In an attempt to distract himself from that little revelation and suddenly sure he'd misstepped, Tony hastily tried to figure out what Cap was planning.

"He can borrow my spares," Cap decided. "They won't be a perfect fit, but at least they'll be closer than anything the rest of you wear."

Tony wasn't sure whether to laugh or throw up his hands in defeat. And that wasn't even touching the ridiculously metaphorical aspect of borrowing Cap's shoes and walking literal miles in them, which was somehow simultaneously making him want to dance with glee and crack wise about the fashion statements he'd be making, pairing bright red combat boots with fatigues.

While Morita dug through his packs for the requested fatigues, Tony tried not to think too hard about anything that had just happened. It was too bizarre and confusing.

"Here," Morita threw the clothing at him. "Layer those over what you're already wearing. Cap, give him those boots, already, so he doesn't have to get his clothes wet."

There had been virtually no way to dissuade any of the Commandos from peeling him out of the armour, now that he'd made a break for freedom once, and Tony knew it. They wanted to hobble him, and he had to agree that it made tactical sense, but he hated knowing that was the reasoning behind it. They didn't attempt to confiscate his armour, but Tony knew that he wouldn't be wearing it again in the near future. The Commandos wouldn't allow it. But he'd had to try.

Taking the fatigues and forcing himself to take the boots Cap offered him, Tony pointedly turned and walked a few steps away from the camp. Let Barnes follow, if he was so paranoid. Tony had no intention of doing the equivalent of stripping himself bare in front of literal Nazis. He had no problem with doing it for an audience, but the Nazis were a step too far, even in the insane situation he currently found himself in.

Taking the armour off made him feel so exposed he almost ignored all common sense and put it back on. Only the fact that Barnes was watching him for any renewed escape attempts stopped him. Taking off his worn shop sneakers and replacing them with the boots helped, for all that they were the wrong shade of red. At least he was wearing his own socks. And now his feet were a bit warmer. Tony carefully didn't think about the fact that the Cap had been right and they did fit reasonably well, considering.

Pulling on the fatigues helped, too, but even so it didn't take long before he was shivering.

Barnes gave him a brusque nod. "Come on. I want some grub. Preferably before it's all gone or cold."

By the time they rejoined the others by the cookfire, several more spare pairs of fatigues had appeared, and Tony picked them up one by one. He had to admit that when he was done he was a lot warmer, even if he did feel like he was wearing a bombproof suit with the way it bulked him up. It would be harder to move than normal, but not freezing was his priority, if they were going to force him out of his suit.

Once he was done dressing, Dugan handed him a helping of stew by dint of thrusting it at him and trusting him to take it or lose his meal to the snow. Tony had to scramble to catch it, but he only spilled a little. "It's edible, right?" He asked, wanting to get a little of his own back.

Dugan huffed at him, mock-offended. "We didn't let the Cap cook."

Tony raised an eyebrow at him. "He's that talented?"

"Much better with a rifle than a stewpot," Dugan replied, a grin in his voice for all that his expression was solemn. 

"Hey now," the Cap tried to protest, but it was clearly half-hearted. Gabe, who was standing guard over their prisoners with Morita, put in, "Hurry up and eat so we can get moving again. It'll make us look bad if these assholes whine about unethical treatment once we get them back to base."

"You are entirely mistaken if you believe we would do otherwise," Zola broke his silence.

"We'll see whom they believe," Cap shot back.

Hastily finishing his food, Tony tried to mentally prepare himself for the march ahead. It was sure to be difficult and much farther than he'd ever walked at a stretch before. Resigning himself to the aches and blisters that he just knew would result, Tony bit back a groan and brushed some snow off his ass. "How much farther is it, anyway?"

Gabe was the one to answer him. "Until we can get to transport? About thirty miles."

Thirty. Miles.

Fuck.

\------

In the end, despite all the chaos of the mission and the very tedious nature of the trip back across the French border, their arrival at the SSR HQ was as anticlimactic as regrouping with the team had been. Along the way he'd gotten to know the team a little better. Dugan hadn't been able to directly help with his blisters, but they'd scrounged up some extra socks for him to layer over his own so that the boots slid around on his feet a bit less. Eventually, though, the miles had passed. When they'd finally reached the end of their hike Tony had all but cried in relief at the sight of the troop transport, for all that it was nothing more than a large pickup truck with benches in the back.

The Commandos had laughed at him, but Tony could tell it was more sympathy than anything else. Gabe had stopped to clap a hand to his shoulder -- thankfully not the one Obie had always grabbed, so at least that memory only peeked out of its box -- and tell him that he'd been nearly flattened after his first march with Cap and Sarge. Falsworth and Dernier had nodded in agreement.

After a drive of about six hours, they finally got to their destination.

The HQ itself was in a tiny village hidden deep in the Vercors forest, and appeared to have once been the Town Hall. Now it was missing half its roof, thanks to what Tony suspected had been a carpet bombing run. Whether it would serve that function again after the War... well, who knew. It was possible that the SSR would simply keep the building and offer the town the money to build a new Town Hall elsewhere, or fix it up and move back Stateside.

From the outside it looked less than imposing, though, despite its size. It was the largest building in the town, with its four stories, and likely had at least one basement level. There were two wings, one on either side of the main doors, and it had a lawn in front of said doors. The whole thing was ringed with a high chain link fence topped with barbed wire, and guarded by three patrols.

Naturally, they were spotted long before the reached the 'gates' in the fence that would allow them entrance to the HQ, and a welcoming committee assembled itself with some alacrity. Two of the three patrols formed up just beyond the 'gates', and waited. As they approached, Cap made sure Tony stayed in the middle of the group of Commandos, then put himself and Zola in the spotlight as the base personnel rushed up to them to relieve them of their prisoners.

Not sure whether that was for his benefit or because Cap wanted to pick his brains about history some more, Tony let it happen and didn't draw attention to himself. He knew a distraction tactic when he saw one, and this one was to his benefit, regardless of the motivations behind it.

They got Tony past the men at the security checkpoint that doubled as the HQ's entrance mostly on Cap's authority. The guards here were more than used to Cap coming and going more or less at random with his unit, and bringing back prisoners -- and other important people. That much was clear in the way they took stock of who the Commandos had brought in this time. The realization that the unit had bagged Zola had caused a bit of a stir, though, and one of the guards had run off to inform the brass.

While Cap and Barnes dealt with handing Zola over, talking to the brass that had appeared once news of their return and Zola's capture had reached them, the rest of the Commandos -- doubtless on Cap's orders, though Tony hadn't heard him give them -- quietly shuffled him out of sight by the simple means of forming up around him and starting to walk.

"Don't make a fuss," Morita muttered to him under his breath, "and come with us."

Tony nodded and didn't answer verbally, careful to keep his suitcase suit and arc reactor out of plain sight as much as he could during their strategic retreat from the HQ. He wasn't going to question them too closely if they were helping him avoid the base's higher ups.

Once they were out of earshot of the brass who'd gathered to receive Zola and the squads of soldiers who'd arrived to take the HYDRA goons into custody, Falsworth added, "You're bunking with us for the time being. Captain's orders."

That made Tony's eyebrows shoot up. He turned to Falsworth. "What? Won't that draw attention?"

Dugan huffed, the sound betraying a muffled chuckle. "Nah. Easy enough to explain away. We got you out of that train, and that light in your chest is something Zola did to torture you. Now Cap and Sarge have taken an interest in you for the intel you could give them."

Stunned, Tony stared at him for a beat. That was even more or less the truth. Then, not sure when he'd won the team over enough that they were willing to help Cap cover for him, Tony swallowed back the words trying to boil up and spill off his lips. "Thanks," he managed to rasp after a few seconds, sure that Sarge had had nothing to do with this decision.

"Make it up to us by running a few missions with us," Gabe put in. "That armour of yours could help a lot."

Ah, so that was their angle. Tony considered it. He'd already changed the course of history just by appearing here. At this point, he could either try to refuse to interfere any further, or he could throw his lot in with the Commandos. He hadn't ceased to exist, or lost his armour or his arc reactor, so any of the changes he'd caused couldn't be too major. The butterfly effect being what it was, though, he was inclined to be cautious.

"I'll think about it," he replied. "I don't want to disrupt anything to do with your operations or my own. Cap told you I'm here as a free agent. I have other obligations to keep in mind that might not align with yours."

"Fair," Morita conceded. "But think fast. Next mission is coming up, soon as the intel guys have pried some answers out of Zola."

It didn't take long for them to make their way back through the small town, and the silence between them held until the Commandos were unlocking a small house and trooping inside. Then there was the expected fight for the showers and other amenities. Tony stood back and let them work things out.

By the time Cap and Barnes rejoined them everyone had showered off and traded their distinctly non-regulation fatigues for their preferred sleepwear but Tony and Gabe, and the rest of them were getting settled into their bunks. Gabe was in the shower, and Tony had chosen to hang out in the hallway while he waited. He leaned against the worn wallpaper, still wearing his borrowed clothes, and listened to the sound of the running water as he considered his next move.

He needed to know what Cap wanted from him -- and what the SSR brass wanted -- before he decided where to run and when. There was no way he was going to get away without being questioned, and he was going to have to submit to letting the SSR medics check him over, in all likelihood. How to handle that was the next hurdle, but he'd have to deal with that after he talked to Cap.

\------

True to Morita's prediction, it didn't take long at all for the Commandos to get their next set of marching orders. Two days after they'd gotten back to the SSR HQ -- which Tony had weathered by avoiding as much contact with the HQ medics and SSR brass as he could get away with, along with pretty much everyone else, in favor of trying to solve the problem of getting home -- Phillips had called for Cap and Sarge. The two men had come back briefed on their next action and hadn't hesitated to let the rest of the team know about it.

Their goal? The destruction of a facility hidden in the Austrian Alps that reportedly had been heavily involved in the manufacture of those tesseract-powered energy weapons that HYDRA appeared to love so much.

Tony wanted to wince. He'd heard about those from Dad a few times. The things vaporized men where they stood and cut through almost all known metals.

He had no idea if they would get through the armour. Cap's shield was reportedly the only metallic object known that could stop the bolts of blue light. Tony knew his gold-titanium alloy suit had similar electronic properties, but whether they were close enough to vibranium to shield him entirely? Well, that was an open question. If the wave-particle interactions of the weapons' energy blasts hit the right intensity thresholds, they might overwhelm his armour's ability to absorb and deflect said blasts.

Gabe had caught his eyes when the orders had come through and held them. A silent challenge disguised as a question. Was he going to do it?

Tony hesitated. This wasn't a mission he knew anything about. Was it one that hadn't happened in his timeline? Would it change the flow of history too much if he took part? Could he do it without dying? His armour and arc reactor would make him a juicy target for anyone with those rayguns.

If he died in the past what would happen in his time?

In the end, he knew, he would probably do it. But the decision to go with the Commandos would have consequences. He wouldn't be able to hide as easily anymore. The story that the arc reactor was some novel form of torture was holding so far, but if, no, _when_ it came out that it was nothing of the sort, he'd be facing an inquisition the likes of none he ever had before.

The medics had already pronounced him as fit as he could be, his newest injuries aside, and accepted his shrapnel scars as non-life-threatening without too much skepticism. The arc reactor gave them more trouble, but the story the Commandos had cooked up about Zola and HYDRA torture had held. Their reactions to his shrapnel scars had been a mix of surprise and horror. It was clear that they knew he should have been dead, had any fragments penetrated. But he'd managed to convince them that none had, thanks to the obvious age of the scars, and it helped that the rest of him was in good physical condition, thanks to his metalworking and Iron Man.

But now he was in a position where if he used the suit, rumours of its existence would start to spread through HYDRA, and propagate from there. The men that had marched back with them already knew about his armour and would doubtless talk about it under interrogation. If he used it again in the new mission against HYDRA, the news that he existed would spread more. Both here and among the Germans.

Then, once HYDRA, in the person of Red Skull, knew about him, they'd target him. That was the last thing Tony wanted. It would mean he'd have a lot of trouble outside of Allied territory and that people affiliated with the SSR other than the Commandos would notice his existence. From there he knew the rest of the Allied Command would find out.

At that point, it wouldn't take a genius to put two and two together and work out who was the suit's pilot. There weren't likely to be two men with arc reactors in the right place to power a suit of flying armour. That was probably what had given him away to Obie, even in his own time.

But on the other hand, he'd grown up on stories of Cap and his Commandos, and their crusade against HYDRA. The chance to join them, to take part, was never going to come up again in his lifetime.

Swallowing back his lingering doubts, Tony took a deep breath and nodded back at Gabe.

For good or ill, the die was cast.


	6. Chapter 6

He'd very carefully dodged any attempt on his dad's part and Aunt Peggy's to see him or interrogate him for the last two days. That paid unexpected dividends just before they boarded the plane, loaded down with their gear.

Aunt Peggy strode purposefully up to Cap as they approached the idling craft, ignoring everyone else around them effortlessly in that way she had that made one person her sole focus. "Captain," she said in her crisp voice, "care to explain to me why you have elected to bring a civilian along on this mission?"

She looked as stunning as the surviving photos from her from this era he'd seen had shown her. If she'd put special effort into her appearance for those photos, it didn't show. And he had to fight the urge to go pull her into a tight hug. Being faced with a Peggy that could still kick ass and take names was filling him with a warm kind of awe. This was the woman he'd grown up adoring, and learning from. She'd taught him more about the world and how to handle it than either of his parents, and he'd loved her better than either of them, for all that there was no familial tie there. The contrast to the shadow she'd become as age overtook her was all the harsher for his knowledge that it was impossible to avoid and that... he swallowed. She probably didn't have a lot of time left.

As Tony fought down the nostalgia that hearing her crisply-accented voice and the authority she'd always had in his memories was sending shuddering through him, Cap gave her a crooked smile. "He offered."

Peggy made a very irritated noise. "That's all well and good, but he has no clearance to--"

"Peg," Cap interrupted, "he's no mere civilian, but I can't give you details. That's for him to decide."

"My clearance is higher than yours, Captain," she retorted acidly. "You'd damn well better have a _very_ good reason for withholding that information." With that, she dismissed the Cap and shifted her laser focus to Tony, who found himself standing a bit straighter under the scrutiny.

Tony shifted the suitcase suit in his hands so that it was half-held behind him. "Agent Carter," he offered with a respectful nod. He'd always admired her poise and take-no-prisoners attitude toward life. It was a bit intimidating to have it applied to him, though.

"You know," she replied, watching him carefully, assessing and weighing him, "I'd reply in kind, but I don't even know your name."

He chuckled at her, letting the sound go a bit rueful. "I'd give it to you, but that's not something I can do without repercussions. Call me Tony."

The statement made her eyebrows shoot up. "No last name?"

"Nope. Long story behind that, which I can't tell you either." Tony shrugged. "Sorry."

"What's the hold-up?" Dugan called from the back of the group. "We've got a tight take-off window."

Reluctantly, looking like she was caught between annoyance, curiosity, and frustration, as she considered whether to let him go with the Commandos or not, Peggy backed down. "Fine," she conceded after a moment that stretched, "you may have won this round, Tony. But don't expect you'll get away so lightly when you return."

Her tone made it clear that he'd _better_ return, or she'd dig him out of his grave to squeeze answers out of him.

Tony laughed. That was every inch the badass he'd known. He knew without a doubt that she'd run all the angles she could think of in the time she'd had. "We'll see, Agent Carter. Pleasure meeting you. The Captain speaks highly of you."

He carefully left out his own opinion of her and forced down the lingering impulse to pull her into a tight hug. He'd missed her sorely over the last few years, confined to her room at the care facility as she was, now that her memory was rapidly deteriorating. He hadn't had a chance to visit her since Afghanistan and Obie, but even before that she sometimes hadn't recognized him on those occasions when he had managed to find a chance to see her.

Shoving the thoughts aside and tipping a sloppy salute her way instead, Tony stepped past her and onto the plane. He heard Peggy exchange a few words with each of the Commandos as they boarded the plane, and then they were all buckling themselves into their seats for the short flight. It wouldn't take long for them to reach their drop zone, and then they'd be parachuting down to the ground.

In about two hours, they'd be back on the ground and probably under fire. That would take his mind off of Peggy, at least. He didn't need to be distracted by those thoughts. Not now, not tomorrow, and preferably not at all, if he could help it.

\------

The flight out to the Austrian border was quiet. The pilot carefully negotiated his way around three flak fields and numerous mountains, but because most of their trip was over Swiss -- and therefore very pointedly neutral -- territory, they didn't get shot at much. Tony wasn't sure just what agreements the SSR had with the Swiss, that they could just fly through like this on short notice, but in the long run that really didn't matter much. The Swiss Air Force did come escort them through most of their flight. Primarily, Tony suspected, to make sure there were no unscheduled side-trips.

There, unfortunately, wasn't much of a view. They were flying through the dead of night, and the mountains appeared as shadows, faintly lit by the moon and stars, but mostly indistinct.

Conversation, when there was any, revolved around the specifics of the mission they were about to begin. Tony only half paid attention; he'd suited up most of the way, letting it close up over him and then opening the faceplate, which meant that JARVIS was recording and he didn't have to listen closely if he didn't want to. He could get the recap from his AI later.

Of course, the team didn't know that.

"Tony," Morita verbally prodded at him, "you even listening?"

"Huh? Oh, sure. Base is roughly square, our target is in the northeast corner, keep out of sight as much as possible," he summarized.

Gabe huffed at him. "You forgot a few things, there."

Tony shrugged. "In a fight, I'm armoured and can fly. You aren't, and can't," he pointed out. "The tactical considerations for me are a bit different. And I'm a lot more visible than you are. Well, most of you. The Cap also makes a nice target of himself."

Cap tilted his head in an approximation of a nod. It was a gesture intended to concede the point and move the discussion along. Barnes seemed to disagree with his Captain again, though. "The fact that you can fly doesn't mean you can ignore a briefing," he said with a scowl.

"We've been over this how many times, Barnes?" Tony shot back, "I am not under your chain of command. Not now, and never will be. Get it through your thick skull."

Dernier sniggered. "Bon. Alors, laisse lui."

"Come on, Barnes," Gabe nodded, intervening. "Tony knows his armour and its capabilities. We don't. He'll adjust to our tactics."

It would be a lie to say that the continuing distrust didn't cut at him. Tony gave Barnes a dark look, but said nothing. Any words he said would only make the situation worse, and he knew it.

"In any case," Cap hauled them back on track, "we're going to be parachuting in, so if the winds force us in the wrong direction, we'll have to approach carefully. Our pilot's doing what he can, but--"

Tony cleared his throat. Cap paused and looked up at him. "If the wind's in the wrong direction, I can redirect you."

Falsworth smirked at him, looking oddly pleased by the offer. "How?" He asked.

"You'll have to jump out of the plane and link hands before you pull the cords on your 'chutes. If you do that, and only one or two of you pull them, I can tow you toward the northeast corner."

"Sounds feasible," the Brit replied with a thoughtful nod. "Captain?"

Tony grinned broadly; this would be fun.

\------

They wound up doing exactly that. Tony wasn't sure what to think about the level of trust in him that their easy acceptance of his suggestion implied. After Barnes' constant suspicion, it felt far too easy. Too simple. Tony bit his lip. If he fucked this up, especially now, he'd never forgive himself.

Five minutes before they arrive at their drop zone, Tony closed his faceplate and watched his HUD come up.

"Sir," JARVIS' voice greeted him a moment later, "might I inquire as to what is happening?"

Tony gave his AI a crooked smirk. "We're running a mission with Cap and the Commandos."

In a foreign-feeling role reversal, it took him one and a half more of the precious minutes before the drop to give his AI the run-down on what needed to happen for the mission to be considered a success.

The rest of the time passed in relative silence.

When the light over the door went green, he was the first one out of the plane, and he took up a position a few meters off the starboard wing. The moment he was there, the others started leaping after him.

With how low they were flying, they would have to move fast and without making any mistakes to pull this off. If they didn't all link hands in time, Tony wouldn't be able to stop them from plummeting to the ground and almost certainly getting badly injured.

One by one, the seconds ticked by. One by one, the Commandos linked hands, their grips as firm as they could make them. Only three would be opening their chutes.

The moment they were all in position, the parachute cords got pulled, and Tony grabbed for Cap's outstretched hand. As the sturdiest of them, he was going to play anchor.

When Cap's red-gloved hand went around the armour's left gauntlet, Tony almost imagined he could feel the grip through the metal alloy. Setting the thought aside, he checked on the chutes and the rest of the Commandos. Satisfied they were alright, he slowly tugged them through the air toward their goal. He was careful to keep the glow of his arc reactor and the bootjets angled away from the base for as long as he could manage.

It felt like forever, but passed in under five minutes. The moment they were in the correct position, the Commandos all let go of one another as one and those who hadn't yet done so all pulled the ripcords on their chutes.

Moments later they were on the ground.

"Good," Cap said quietly with a nod. "It looks like we got away clean. The base's watchmen haven't raised the alarm."

"Let's hope it stays that way until we can also get out of here," Dumdum muttered.

Barnes snorted at him a bit derisively. "You know better than to hope for that."

"Hey, it might happen," Dugan defended himself mildly.

Something about the exchange struck Tony as odd, but he wasn't sure what. Filing the thought away for later, he waited until the rest of the group had gotten themselves organized and underway before he hit his thrusters and sent himself skyward. It was time for him to draw some attention to himself.

\------

In retrospect, Tony had to admit, playing target so as to draw fire away from the Commandos when he didn't know whether the HYDRA rayguns could hurt him had been a bad idea.

He bit back a groan; every tiny movement hurt. Including breathing and possibly also thinking. Annoyingly, this new set of aches and pains had hit him right after the last set had subsided to manageable levels. Hopefully, he hadn't re-injured himself now that his concussion and bruises had finally started disappearing rather than just subsiding. But he wasn't about to put all his money on that possibility.

The mission had been a success, in the end. He knew that much. And the Commandos had gotten away as clean as they'd hoped, despite getting caught and being targeted by pretty much the whole base. It had been a mad scramble to get them all out uninjured, but they'd managed, portions of the base exploding as they ran. Tony had been in the air above and just behind them, playing target and picking off any HYDRA foot soldiers he could, as he covered their retreat. It had all gone off almost perfectly, too. Almost. One of the remaining HYDRA goons had gotten lucky and tagged Tony in the back with one of those rayguns as he'd turned to follow the team.

The shot that had taken him out had knocked his repulsors offline, sending him tumbling to the ground, and taken JARVIS out as well, rendering him briefly helpless. Before he could climb to his feet in his inert armour, a squad of six goons was on him and pinning him bodily to the ground. Tony could only watch as the Howlies vanished into the forest around the base, then he was being secured, none too gently loaded onto a truck, and driven off.

In a very real way his capture had meant they'd accomplished their objective. They had succeeded in destroying the base, and also gotten back out without casualties because the enemy had been more preoccupied with Tony and his armour. The downside was that being taken had landed Tony in exactly the position he didn't want to be: immobilized, tied down on a table, and waiting for a bunch of scientists to enter the room with the intent of figuring out whether he was man or robot, and how he worked, with no regard for his continued survival.

The goons that had bagged him had immediately carried him off to some other nearby base whose existence and location Tony was fairly sure hadn't been known to the SSR brass or the Commandos. Once they'd arrived, they'd carted him down several floors, through what felt like an endless warren of identical corridors -- Tony had counted steps and lefts and rights regardless -- and then secured him with bonds that had turned out to be just strong enough that he couldn't break out of them with the lightweight suitcase armour unless he could find a way to get more leverage.

And so here he was, cooling his heels, waiting to find out what was going to happen to him. If Cap had any tactical sense, he'd get out of dodge with the rest of the Commandos, and bring news of their success back to Phillips and Carter.

Granted, if the Commandos took that course of action -- as was overwhelmingly likely given that they had no real need or motive to come back for him -- it left Tony very few options; the way things stood now, every mode of escape he could think of presupposed that he could get out of his bonds. That alone wouldn't be easy, but if he could get free, he could steal himself tools and equipment aplenty. And try to wreck this base, as well, on his way out.

The big question was how to do all of that.

Since he couldn't break free using simple brute force, he might well have to wait until someone came into the room and started trying to pry secrets out of him.

As he finished the thought, alarms started sounding. The lights went red and Tony recognized what had to be base defense protocols. His eyes narrowed as he stared up at his dark faceplate. "Odds that that's the cavalry?" He muttered to himself. "Could just be a drill." That was the logical alternative that he didn't want to consider. Hope was flaring wildly in him.

Helpless, all he could do was wait.

A few minutes that felt like years later, the door to the lab he'd been placed in burst open and a very familiar figure tumbled through, coming up with his shield readied.

"You alright?" Cap asked when he'd scanned the room and come up empty. "You're looking all tied up, at the moment."

"For now. Can't break myself out, though." Tony responded, relief flooding through him strongly enough to leave him a bit limp and laughing weakly at the Cap's horrible pun. "I'll have to make some repairs, after this."

Cap's shield came down on the tie securing his left wrist, and Tony reflexively flinched away from it as much as he could. The metal clasp squealed and broke under the impact, and Tony swore some of the paint came off the gauntlet of his suit, but then Cap was pulling the strap loose. Tony took the opportunity to free his arm and use the strength the servos in his armour gave him to pry the other wrist strap open while Cap dealt with the ties around his thighs and ankles. That only left the one around his torso, and Tony simply ripped it out of its moorings, now that he had his arms free. He staggered to his feet and Cap steadied him. The situation felt bizarrely safe and reassuring, for all that something he couldn't pin down was missing. Tony put that thought aside as Cap spoke.

"Come on, we need to get back to the team and scram," his rescuer instructed, turning to the door and hastily checking to see whether he'd been followed here.

Tony nodded dumbly in response and let Cap hustle him out into the hallway. Along the way back to the doors of the building, they ran into a pair of squads of HYDRA foot soldiers, but it didn't take them long to dispatch the men. The quality of the soldiers HYDRA was fielding against them simply wasn't high enough to stand up to him and Cap.

And that part was also really strange. Despite the very abbreviated nature of their acquaintance it was like they had clicked into place at one another's sides. Like they were two pressure-fit parts that fit perfectly together. Their fighting styles were so different that they really _shouldn't_ be able work together at all, let alone seamlessly, on such short notice, but they never missed a beat as they tore through their opposition as though it was wet newspaper.

"Left up ahead," Cap called to him, as they climbed a flight of stairs.

Following Cap's directions left Tony grinning at his HUD and a wide open door framing the rest of the team.

"Let's blow this joint, then," he returned, knowing his smile had to be audible. "Dunno about you, but I'm ready to leave."

Barnes huffed at him as he and Cap burst out through the doors and the Commandos fell in with them. "Scenery's not bad by German standards, but the service ain't what I'm used to," he agreed.


	7. Chapter 7

They'd missed their scheduled rendezvous with the extraction team, because the Commandos were a group of idiots and had chosen to go back for Tony rather than do the sensible thing and bug out with their victory under their belts and the news that they'd accomplished what they set out to do.

In retrospect, Tony had to admit that expecting this team to follow common sense was a bit like asking ice to flow uphill. There was a minuscule chance that it could happen, but it was as near zero as made no appreciable difference.

And he was definitely very glad not to be stuck on that table.

The moment they were out of sight of the base, the team had slowed their headlong pace through the surrounding forests. Tony, who'd taken to the air, had let himself drop down to the ground when the team paused to regroup.

"New pick up point is ten klicks to our northwest," Cap said without preamble, as he pulled out a map and compass to orient himself, "and our contact is scheduled to arrive there an hour from now."

That would be a fairly tough hike.

Running ten klicks on level ground in an hour was not particularly easy, even if you were a good runner, and the ground between them and their rendezvous point was anything but level or smooth, given their location in the Austrian Alps.

Despite that, no one put up a fuss.

Falsworth, as radio man, piped up. "We calling ahead to ask for more time?"

"No," Cap shook his head. "We can't risk it, this close to the base. Our pick up ought to give us the usual half an hour's grace, unless they're discovered."

After a short silence, clearly intended for anyone who wanted to, to speak up with additional information or objections, they'd taken off more or less as one. Moving quickly over the rocky ground and taking the directest route they could, the Commandos covered the ground a lot faster than Tony would have expected, keeping pace with their Captain easily. Of course, Tony knew, the Captain wasn't exerting himself at the moment.

In the end, it was a near thing, but their return to SSR HQ didn't turn into an extended hike this time.

After missing several pick-ups during previous missions, Cap and Sarge had finally started planning two and possibly even three into their return trips. The last straw had apparently been the mission Tony had unintentionally crashed. On the heels of that one, from what Tony could gather, Agent Carter had started insisting, and Cap had finally bowed his stubborn head. He'd seen the logic, and respected Carter enough to accept the suggestion at last. Tony remembered several stories to that effect, that Peggy had loved to tell him, just to prove the Captain had been as human as anyone else.

They hadn't run into any opposition, rather to Tony's surprise, but their caution had slowed them down slightly instead. Rather than risk getting caught by the HYDRA men at either of the two bases they'd just hit, the Commandos had chosen to take the long way around several mountains rather than try to travel more or less as the crow flew.

Tony spent the hike in the air, keeping watch from above, with JARVIS' help, and ready to draw any patrols away from the Commandos again, if needed. All of them were relieved that he didn't have to, Tony included. He was privately a bit surprised that Barnes was, since that implied Sarge had suddenly changed his mind about him, but he kept that thought to himself.

When they'd gotten to the pick up point, their contact had already been there, leaning against the fuselage of his idling plane. On their approach he'd looked up and grinned. Tony had wanted to refuse the ride back to the base, and to hell with the fact that his refusal would draw a lot of attention.

He recognized the man; he'd seen photos of his dad from back when. But the body language and attitude were so different from what he'd known that it was disorienting. In a way it was like discovering that the Earth's gravity suddenly pulled upward rather than down. Whoever this was, it very definitely wasn't the Howard Stark he'd grown up knowing. This man was less guilt-ridden, hadn't yet seen whatever he'd experienced to turn him into a bitter old man. The father he'd known was a far cry from this cheerful and seemingly carefree guy. It was as though something had happened to extinguish the light in his dad, sometime between this time and Tony's own.

To make the moment even more awkward, Tony had a suspicion he knew what that had been, seeing the way his his dad turned every bit of his attention to the Cap as soon as they were in easy conversational distance. It was like watching a lodestone approach a magnet.

Drawing Tony's focus back to the present, his dad spoke up.

"Late again, Captain?" Howard ribbed him a bit in that offhanded way Aunt Peggy had once told Tony his dad had had, long ago. "Got lost trying to find your way here?"

Barnes rolled his eyes as Cap replied, "Didn't want to lead HYDRA right to you, Mr. Stark. You ready for take-off?"

"Whenever you are." Howard gave Tony a long once-over, then added, "Once we're back at HQ, I want to get hands on with that. I'd heard the rumours at HQ that you'd found a HYDRA robot when you caught Zola, but seeing it in person..."

"Fuck off. I'm no robot." Tony growled, caught between being offended at being mistaken for a robot and the need not to let anyone anywhere near his tech. At all.

Howard startled hard at the sound of his transmuted voice, then looked even more intrigued. "Oh, well, then. That's... Interesting. There's a pilot in there? You didn't build that armour, did you? Wait." Howard glanced around, obviously counting heads and coming up one short. "Agent Carter said you'd taken a civilian with you, Captain. Is that him inside that armour?"

Cap sighed. "Not now, Mr. Stark. We need to get in the plane and get out of here. I want to be out of enemy territory before you start interrogating anyone about anything."

"Right," Howard visibly forced himself to set aside his attempts to reverse engineer the armour on the spot with nothing but his eyes, his knowledge of current technology, and his brain. "Come on, then. Load up," he replied airily and vanished into the plane to settle himself at the controls.

Dugan's hand landed on his armoured shoulder as the rest of the team filed into the plane, and it was Tony's turn to startle. "Don't let him get to you. Man gets so focused when you hand him an engineering puzzle that he wouldn't notice a pretty set of legs if their owner came up and sat in his lap," Dugan told him, as though Tony had never met Howard in his life. But then, he'd only told Cap and Sarge of the family relation.

Dumdum's hand stayed there, oddly comforting despite the layers of metal between them, and Tony nodded. He let Dugan steer him into the back of the plane, thinking dazedly that apparently he'd gotten more than just his smarts from his dad.

Morita put in, leaning toward Tony and raising his voice to make himself heard over the roar of the prop engines. "You'll have your work cut out for you keeping Stark from pestering you day and night, now."

"Awww, come on, fellas. I'm not that bad." Howard protested, making the Commandos laugh uproariously at his attempt to save face.

Tony wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. "You know what, JARVIS," he muttered to his dark faceplate, "we're leaving SSR HQ tonight. I can't deal with this right now. Maybe not ever."

\------

This time, since he'd been a part of the mission, Tony also had to go through the debriefing afterwards. The moment they'd gotten back off the plane, Agent Carter had deftly corralled them into the Headquarters building, not leaving them a chance to go back to their makeshift barracks or change or shower. She'd been implacable about it, and the Commandos had gone with it, apparently used to having her calling the shots.

She'd led them down corridors that didn't seem to have any kind of identifying marks and felt eerily like the HYDRA bases he'd just seen, for all that they were painted a neutral beige and had the correctly colored contrasting bland mud brown floor tiles. There was no art on the walls, and every so often Tony thought he spied a hole in the wall that could have have been made by a bullet. On the whole, though, the building was intact, and the lack of clear signage or art was likely a defensive measure.

After the first few turns, Tony started counting doors, windows, lefts and rights. Without that, he wasn't sure he'd find his way back out, regardless of his near eidetic memory. As they'd moved through the base and then the main HQ building, he'd garnered a very large number of curious stares. There was a good reason for that, though. He hadn't stripped off his armour on the flight back for much the same reason as on his hike with the Commandos: he'd had no desire to let his dad or the rest of the local brass know about the fact that the arc reactor was part of him and not the suit. And now he was paying for that; the rumour mill would be turning so fast it almost caught fire, after this, and all he could do was hope that the cover story that Zola had done this to him would hold.

His 'hosts' had forced him to remove his helmet once they were inside the HQ building. Tony had reluctantly complied.

Four lefts, two rights, twelve doors and five flights of stairs later, Peggy stopped in front of another nondescript unlabeled door and pushed it open, waiting expectantly for them to enter. Tony fought down the urge to swallow or clear his throat awkwardly as he let Dernier and Morita precede him through the doorway. He really didn't want to have to sit through this. There was a very real danger that someone would ask the wrong question or he'd slip up and use a the wrong slang, or that his 'opponents' -- and they _were_ his opponents, for all that he knew they were all on the same side -- would figure him out.

The room they'd been ushered into was only just large enough to hold all of them, Peggy, Phillips, Howard, and the pair of men already at work scribbling notes in shorthand on their steno pads. The table set in the center of the room took up the majority of the floorspace, and once the chairs were occupied, there was just about enough room leftover between their backs and the wall for a person to sidle past. The walls in here were the same dull beige and the table itself looked like it had seen battle itself. Or maybe a lot of late-night planning and strategy sessions. There were water stains near most of the chairs, probably leftover from mugs of coffee, any number of scratches, and some suspicious dents that might have come from someone slamming a mug down in excitement or anger. This was a table like those he'd seen at university. One that was used hard daily and had all kinds of history attached. Nothing like his own furniture or his parent's. What he'd grown up with had always been immaculate, right up until he'd gone off to MIT and learned what use did to everyday objects.

He threw off the slight reverie as the Commandos took their seats at the long rectangular table, facing Phillips, Peggy, and Howard, and ignored the pair of scribes entirely. Tony followed their lead, only a split second behind them, gingerly settling himself with a care for his seat's structural integrity. It creaked loudly under the armour's weight, but held. The quiet scrape of chair legs against the floor was the only sound in the room for a long few seconds.

"Alright, Rogers," Colonel Phillips opened brusquely, a scowl on his face, "let's hear it. You're late. Again."

"Well, Sir," Cap replied, calm in the face of his superior's clear annoyance, "it's like this. We achieved our objectives at the base we were briefed on, and then Tony got captured by HYDRA. We couldn't in good conscience leave him in their hands, and pursuing the men who took him got us intel on a research base we hadn't discovered until now. It's located about fifteen klicks from the base we hit, and seems to specialize in human experimentation."

That was a very clear and succinct way to put it. Tony stopped himself from nodding approvingly. Peggy pursed her lips and started in on the Cap, asking questions designed to get as much detail out of the man's impressive memory as she could. Cap's memory was nearly as good as his own, and perhaps better, Tony knew from Peggy's stories. The man could take one look around a room and then draw everything in it from memory if needed. He'd memorised a map of HYDRA's installations the night he'd broken Barnes and the Howlies out of that detention camp in Austria, and the information he'd brought back had won the Allies more than a month's worth of battles. Tony was better at understanding and seeing how things fit together than at memorising things, but he could, if he chose. He just didn't, most of the time. The banalities of everyday life weren't worth remembering, really. That was what he had JARVIS for.

Throughout the lengthy process that dredging the Cap's memory turned out to be, Tony noted that Phillips wouldn't stop scowling at him, while Howard stared at him thoughtfully more often than not, observing. Trying to use Tony's reactions to what Cap said and what Peggy asked to work out the most effective angle to use to pry information out of him, no doubt.

When Peggy decided she was done with the Cap, she nodded, and then repeated the process with the rest of them, albeit more quickly.

She saved Tony for last. Catching his eyes, she asked, "Do you have anything to add, Tony?"

"Not really. I'd say the others have covered everything in all its gory detail already," he responded, knowing he was going to be in for a long grilling, thanks to his insouciant tone.

Agent Carter stared him down. "We'll see about that. Let's take it from the top. Tell me about that maneuver you used to get the Captain and his team from the plane to the ground."

"Well, it's pretty simple, really. We knew the wind was coming from the wrong quarter, so I took advantage of the way the drag from their parachutes slowed their fall. That gave me time to use my armour to tow them through the air to where they needed to be." Tony shrugged.

"And how exactly did you do that?" Howard put in.

"My armour flies."

The conversation devolved into a discussion of engineering for a while, after that, and Tony had to be careful not to give away too much. If he wanted to avoid having Phillips order him to turn over his armour for analysis, he'd have to be very cautious. Admitting that the armour was his and that it could fly was already bad enough, in that regard. But the Commandos had mentioned it, so he couldn't leave it out. The details of _how_ exactly it did that, though? Those he kept behind his teeth and spun some nonsense about magnetic impulse fields that would sound convincing enough to be plausible to Howard, if futuristic as hell.

"I'll ask again: let me get hands on with that armour." Howard tried to insist.

Luckily for him, Cap stepped in. "No, Howard. That was one of his conditions for helping us, and having him around really saved our bacon on the mission we just completed. I can't allow you to take an asset like him away from my team by breaking that trust."

Tony carefully hid his surprise under a nod. "I can't give out more details about how the armour works than I have already without huge consequences," he added, "both personal and otherwise."

Peggy was far more focused and implacable than his dad had been. After a quarter hour or so of letting Howard pick the line of questioning, Agent Carter put a stop to his engineering-based interrogation. She directed her effort into trying to verbally pick him apart, instead. Asking pointed questions and trying to use his phrasing against him.

It failed pretty miserably, rather to Tony's amusement and her annoyance, because she'd been the one to teach him how to deal with someone attempting to do just that. Having her own knowledge used against her left her looking more than a little bit put out and reluctantly impressed.

He'd never imagined that his experience giving press conferences would be working to his advantage in an interrogation led by his Aunt Peggy, either, but here they were. He didn't like doing it. Peggy had always been one of the best beloved figures in his life. But he couldn't let her work out what he'd told Cap and Sarge, or he'd be in a world of trouble.

Luckily, he had plenty of practice keeping his statements vague, and sticking to his conversational guns in the face of a media inquisition. It had been easy enough to distract his dad. He could -- and did -- give Howard a few tidbits of information, insist that the rest had to stay secret because otherwise he'd have to relive Zola's torture, and let his dad try to reverse engineer the rest himself. He cautiously shoved back the memories of the torture that had actually accompanied the arc reactor's genesis anytime they tried to resurface, and knew that his expression when they did probably helped his cause.

Thankfully for Tony's state of mind, they got through the debriefing with a minimum of actual verbal skirmishes because they'd come back with enough new intel to justify breaking Tony out of whatever other HYDRA base he'd been dragged to. That was a distinct relief; he didn't need the SSR brass deciding to put him under a microscope.

When Phillips decided they'd grilled the team well enough to get all the details out of them that were necessary or useful, he sat back in his seat. "Rogers," he said, his voice deliberately pitched low and serious, "if you hadn't also come back with valuable intel on that second base, you'd have been in for a damn sight more trouble, bringing an uncleared civilian on a top secret mission. Even if he did save your collective asses. You pull that kind of a stunt again and I'll personally see you demoted back to chorus girl. I don't care how good of a fighter he is, or how much he helps you on mission."

"Sir," Rogers nodded, accepting the chastisement.

Phillips stared Cap down for another few heartbeats, then nodded. "Dismissed, Commandos. Go clean up. You reek. Tony, you're staying here."

He stubbornly hadn't given them his last name, offering them a false one instead, and Tony could tell all three of his erstwhile opponents _hated_ that they hadn't managed to pry the truth out of him. It was obvious that they knew it was false, and it galled them to have to accept that he wasn't going to break in a simple debriefing.

"Sir," Cap tried to protest, "Tony's--"

"Rogers, what did I just tell you?" Phillips cut him off sharply and Tony could see why everyone respected the guy. "Get the hell out of my sight and stop defending your stray. He can take care of himself."

"Yes, sir."

"Come on, Steve," Barnes said, putting a firm hand on Cap's shoulder. "He's right. You've got a hot date with a long shower."

The rest of the team silently filed out of the room, and their pair of commanders followed.

Tony forced himself not to swallow against the way his throat tightened when the door thumped shut again behind them, leaving him alone in the room with the brass and the stenographers. "Colonel Phillips?" He decided to take the initiative, straightening his shoulders and looking the man in the eye, "Was there something you wanted to speak to me about?"

Phillips snorted a bit derisively. "Rogers might trust you, but I don't," he said bluntly.

Relieved that the first thing out of the man's mouth hadn't been a demand that he hand over the armour after all, Tony shrugged. "You're right not to. In your position, I wouldn't trust me either."

"Then you understand why I can't allow you to support that team any farther." The Colonel went on.

"I understand, but I disagree. In your position," Tony replied mildly, "I'd use every resource, trusted or not. After all, you have no such qualms over acting on what Dr. Zola can tell you, I expect, and his trustworthiness is far more questionable than mine. But that's your choice." He paused and offered Phillips an edged smile. "Rogers can take care of himself."

The sally got an answering half-smile out of Phillips. "Maybe, maybe not. You've known the man for less than a week. You don't know anything about him except the legends and propaganda."

"I know enough," Tony shot back. "You may not trust me, and I can tell that Mr. Stark and Agent Carter don't either, but Rogers thinks I can help him win his fight. Thinks I'm worth enough in firepower and other resources that he went back for me, against all tactics and common sense. He damned well went into a situation where I'd personally have probably cut my losses and mourned. If you think you can stop him from dragging me along on his missions, you can try. I doubt it'll work."

"I should just bury you in an interrogation cell until you damn well talk," Phillips muttered.

Agent Carter sniffed. "The good Captain would only dig him out. Tony is entirely correct in that assessment, I'm afraid."

Howard, who'd kept his mouth shut throughout this exchange, nodded. "Carter's right." He turned to Tony. "I know you've said you can't -- or maybe I should say won't -- let me analyse that armour of yours. Here's the deal I'm going to offer, in my capacity as the SSR's chief mechanical engineer and weapons expert: give me what you can in accurate information and specifications, and swear an oath that you won't interfere with the missions Cap and his men get sent on, and I'll see what I can do to help you get home. You referred to that as being difficult somehow, several times. I can get you a private plane without any trouble."

Phillips started to growl again, feeling like Howard was undermining him or usurping his decision-making role or whatever, but he didn't speak. Tony considered the offer. What could he give Howard that wouldn't break the course of history?

A beat later the answer came to him, so obvious he almost wanted to laugh. It sure as hell wouldn't be easy working with his dad like this, but it was both the best chance he had to get home, and the one that would secure his position against interrogation or whatever other horrors the brass might yet inflict on him if he'd refused the deal. He had less than no desire to have anyone come near him with the intent to analyse the arc reactor. After Obie...

He forced down a shudder and offered Howard a hand to shake. At least this Howard was so far from the one he'd known as a kid that it was like dealing with an entirely different person. "Alright, Mr. Stark, you've got yourself a deal. Luckily for you, that oath doesn't conflict with any of my other obligations."


	8. Chapter 8

When Phillips, Peggy, and Howard had finally let him leave, new oaths sworn and with promises extracted that he'd meet Howard in the engineering labs in the building's basement the following morning, Tony decided he should follow Phillips' advice to the Commandos, himself. He went back to his borrowed quarters long enough to fetch a towel and a change of clothes, then made his way to the shared showers located on the ground floor of the house.

When he got there, Tony breezed in through the doors, expecting that the space would be more or less empty. It was that hour of the morning when he usually fell asleep after a workshop bender -- read: about 10am -- and therefore long after the showers were usually in demand. The Commandos would also be long done with their clean-up.

Or, well. He'd thought they would be anyway. Tony got through the door and froze, reflexively catching it before it could fall shut, on hearing two very familiar voices. They were being very quiet about it, but in a space like this voices carried. Even over the sound of running water.

"-- don't know what to think anymore, Steve," Barnes was saying. "He's too damned attractive for his own good, but I know next to nothing about him, and can't trust him."

Wait... Tony blinked. Did that mean Barnes was bi? No, more; it meant Barnes was bi and Cap knew. That scanned. The man ran an integrated unit, and had likely had to force the brass to accept that fact. It made sense that the Cap also wouldn't give a flying fuck about sexual orientation.

"Buck, you know I'm the last person who'd ever give you a hard time over something like that." Cap answered. "He keeps tempting me, too. I know you've seen it. Doesn't even know he's doing it, either."

So they were both bi? Or maybe pan? Shit. What were the odds of that? Astronomical, probably. This little tidbit was definitely not something that had made it into the history books, and nothing about that surprised Tony. On the other hand, Tony'd heard volumes about Steve and Peggy and their doomed romance.

Barnes sniffed. "If he were doing it deliberately, I'd be a lot angrier about this whole mess. Steve, you know as well as I do that we can't let ourselves get attached. Not in our line of work. He'll leave and we'll never see him again."

"We have each other, Buck. To the end of the line." Cap's voice was solid as bedrock and as reassuring.

"To the end of the line." Barnes agreed, on a sigh.

Tony took a breath. Okay, so the two of them were probably an item. Not that shocking, really. Only a little, in fact. Mostly because neither his dad nor Aunt Peggy had ever even raised the possibility. At least not verbally. Or not around him. Whichever. Moreover, it made sense that Cap and Sarge would allow the media of the day to play up Cap's romance with Peggy. It gave them camouflage for their own relationship that they didn't even have to work to maintain. Surprising was that there weren't even any rumours that they'd been involved. There were always people speculating about celebrities, and in this time Cap was one. Then, more surprising still, they were both attracted to the same guy? The lucky bastard better appreciate that.

There was a brief silence, and Tony debated making his presence known. Then Cap totally floored him by adding, "You're right, though. Be nice if we could have each other and Tony too. Guess I have a type."

Tony would have been less surprised to get struck by lightning indoors.

Nothing about that statement computed.

Well, no, that wasn't strictly true. Cap and Barnes being an item? That fit. That made sense. You could see it in the old film reels, if you looked carefully. But for both of them to be attracted to him? No. Nope. Impossible. And even if it were a thing that could happen, Barnes was exactly right about one thing; he couldn't let himself get attached to Tony while Tony happened to be stuck in this time with them. Neither could Steve. And Tony couldn't get attached, either, for the same reasons. He'd never see them again once he got home.

Breaking into Tony's thoughts, Barnes laughed at his best friend. "That you do, punk," he answered. "Come on. Let's get dried off and go find something to eat."

Tony hastily let the door close with a loud thump and set about making some noise as he tossed his change of clothes over a nearby bar and let the belt buckle chime, then toed his boots off with a groan.

Cap called out to him, "That you, Tony?"

"Yeah. Finally got free of the Inquisition and I think I might sleep for a week." Tony answered, hastily shoving all the whirling thoughts about Cap's sexuality, Barnes' attraction to him, and anything else he could into a box. He could worry about that later. If at all. For now, it would be best if he didn't give away that he'd overheard them.

His quip got an amused sound in return from Barnes. "Yeah, Phillips and Carter have that effect on people. Hurry up and shower, then come join us in the mess. If you don't eat before you sleep for that week, you'll regret it."

\------

Of course, he didn't get to sleep for the week he wanted. Impatient, Howard had hauled him out of bed almost bodily the next morning, to the loud irritation of the rest of the Commandos, who'd evidently wanted to sleep in. Howard's eagerness and Tony's very pointed lack of tolerance for Howard's excited attitude had had most of them sniggering in minutes and the rest swearing at them to get the hell out of their makeshift barracks so they could sleep a little more. Only the Cap hadn't given in to his laughter. Whether in an attempt to be diplomatically neutral or for some other reason entirely, Tony had no idea.

Tony scowled at the Cap as Howard did his damnedest to chivvy him out of the barracks without giving him time to pull on a fucking pair of pants, and got an entirely unapologetic answering shrug from the man.

Partly to spite his dad, and partly to maintain a modicum of secrecy about his arc reactor, Tony insisted on said pair of pants and two shirts. He didn't intend to display his arc reactor to the world, if he could avoid it. Not given what he was about to tell Howard. He didn't want the resemblance between the two pieces of tech to get noticed. Whatever else you might say about him, Howard wasn't dumb.

"Come _on_ ," Howard grumbled at him, impatient. "If it takes coffee, I'll get you coffee, but you promised me information."

That offer definitely sweetened the deal. He hadn't had a real cup of coffee since he'd been dumped into the past, but he didn't doubt that his dad had a stash somewhere, or access to something far better than the mess offered. Tony gave in. "You're on. Get me a real coffee, and you'll have your information."

Howard's workshop turned out to be a large warmly lit basement of the HQ populated by a group of other engineers and scientists who came and went freely. It had no windows and was home to a lot of engineering projects whose prototypes were in varying stages of completion.

Howard ignored the projects and the scientists alike entirely, leading Tony over to the far corner of the large space, where they'd set up a small kitchenette. It had clearly been intended to be temporary, consisting of a camping stove set up next to a sink clearly meant for an industrial space rather than a kitchen, and never replaced with a more permanent installation, but it worked.

"So this is your place, huh," Tony glanced around a little critically as Howard made up the promised coffee, and then made one for himself as well.

"It's not much, but there aren't a lot of other options open to us," Howard answered and shrugged as he took a long pull from his mug. "It gets the job done, and most of the equipment is fairly up-to-date. Not as state-of-the-art as my own would be, but the SSR doesn't have the budget for that and it's not worth the hassle of shipping my own lab over by convoy. The odds that it'd end up at the bottom of the Atlantic are too high."

Right. Submarine attacks were a thing, weren't they. "Fair. What's highest priority, here?"

Tony took a sip of his own coffee as he waited for Howard's response and almost wanted to cry. It was bordering on scorched, the way his dad had always drunk it, but as he'd expected it was miles better than the canteen offered.

Howard watched him shrewdly for a beat. "My first priority is whatever information you're willing to give me. Second is trying to unravel the HYDRA weaponry the Cap brought back with him recently. No one else has been able to make heads or tails of them. The rest of these projects are there for the others to work on."

A tall broad-shouldered man with thick dark hair walked over to them, purpose in his stride. "Howard," he said, ignoring Tony entirely, "when you're done entertaining your guest, the chemists want your opinion on the new explosive they're working on, and the mechanical engineers have a new rifle design that needs your stamp of approval before it can go to the SSR brass."

"Sure, Obie," Howard replied airily, and Tony had to work hard to keep his expression more or less neutral.

Jesus. Of all the people to get blindsided by.

He hadn't recognised Obie at all. This much younger version of the man he'd known was almost as different from 'his' Obie as his dad was different from the person he remembered. This Obie looked and sounded a lot less serious, less stressed and somehow happier despite the war. Or perhaps because of it, Tony wasn't sure. Obie had always said that a good war meant lots of industrial and economic growth. He wasn't strictly wrong, either. But it was a shortsighted way of thinking. After the war ended, there was always a slump, after all, and wars that never ended only ground the nations involved into dust.

That had been one of Tony's reasons for trying to supply the US Armed Forces with better weaponry. If they could end the wars in the Middle East, once and for all, that would finally allow the people there to rebuild. And the way Obie had undermined that...

Biting down harshly on the wild urge to pre-emptively punch Obie's lights out, Tony forced himself not to look fully at the man. He couldn't afford to get into that little scuffle. If he did, he'd be giving himself away, and then he'd have to explain to the brass, to Howard, and to Obie, and then, even if they believed half his story, he'd end up in a mental hospital.

As it was, he was probably lucky that his strong resemblance to Howard had gone unnoticed for this long. That was probably only because he was currently older than Howard, he realised. In what was probably the weirdest thing to cross his mind so far on this little side trip through history, it suddenly hit him that he was in a room with his dad and Obie _and he was older than either of them_. There were so many things about that that were unsettling, Tony didn't even know where to start.

He shoved it aside instead, realizing Howard was talking to him again, "-- sit down."

That was probably a good idea. "Sure, lead on."

He desperately needed a distraction right now, anyway. He needed to sort out the tangled mess of his thoughts. Letting his dad pick his brain about engineering would be just the thing. Even that was less weird than what had just happened. His hindbrain would work on the tangles as he focused on the task ahead of him.

\------

Two hours later, Obie appeared to drag Howard away bodily. Meantime, Howard and Tony had laid the metaphorical foundations for what Tony knew would become the large-diameter L.A. arc reactor in a decade or two, after Howard managed to perfect the materials he needed and complete the design.

He himself was surprisingly tired. It was harder work than he'd thought it would be keeping his knowledge of the future and all his tech from just accidentally spilling out. His own everyday vocabulary was so different from his dad's that he had to keep translating everything, and that made everything much more complicated to convey at first.

Once he'd gotten used to thinking in terms of the tech of the time, things had smoothed out and he'd stopped having to stop and think hard every time he spoke, but then Howard had started pushing for more detail about this or the other thing to do with the arc reactor they were (re-)designing together. Tony had very quickly found himself mired in a detailed discussion of dielectric media, resistor values, the capacitances that the reactor needed to be able to sustain to run, and all manner of other related minutiae, even before they started on the schematics.

In their preliminary discussion, Tony carefully passed his chest piece off as something Zola had allegedly done to him, and the reactor design they were putting together as something inspired by Zola's HYDRA tech. Howard had nodded seriously and accepted that without question, somewhat to Tony's surprise. After that it didn't take him long to settle in to sketch out schematics and add notations as they talked. That status quo had held until Obie'd interrupted.

Tony had carefully stayed out of Obie's way, again, hurriedly excusing himself to find something to eat when his stomach growled.

Before he could go far, Barnes had appeared out of thin air, and made him jump.

"Tony?" Barnes hailed him, eyeing him a bit suspiciously. "You look like you're running from something. Everything alright?"

Tony eyed Barnes right back. That simple question and the concern it implied represented a dramatic change of heart, relative to the harsh stance he'd taken at their first meeting and stubbornly stuck to, since. Not sure what to think about that, especially in the context of the conversation he'd accidentally overheard in the showers, Tony shrugged. "Guess so. What's on the menu today? Probably should find something to eat."

"The usual. Meatloaf and pasta with a side of limp salad," Barnes replied, making a face.

Laughing at him, Tony turned toward the mess hall. "Could be worse," he pointed out.

"Oh, I know," Barnes grumbled. "Could be Steve cooking."


	9. Chapter 9

The next few mornings had followed the same pattern.

He and Howard had worked through the design piece by piece, first sketching in the rough parameters and then refining what was there. Each one they'd finished had left Howard more pleased with himself and with Tony. "This will revolutionize the world," he'd declared with a broad grin.

Barnes always seemed to turn up to monopolize his attention once he was free of Howard's workshop, in a bewildering twist, to prod him into eating or otherwise nag Tony into taking care of himself.

Carefully borrowing a few supplies from Howard's workshop and carrying them back to his temporary quarters, Tony fixed up his armour properly. The biggest issues could luckily be remedied with some judicious application of solder, electrical tape, and a few replacement resistors.

Then, just after he and his dad had finished the first draft of the plans and long before Tony had worked out how he felt about Barnes' sudden change of heart, the Commandos had gotten their next set of marching orders. The contents of that briefing -- which Cap had insisted Tony be allowed to attend, to Phillips' displeasure -- had sent a strong chill of foreboding down Tony's spine. He didn't know what, but he knew something about this mission was going to end in disaster.

\------

As they approached the alpine stronghold that intel's reports said Zola had revealed was the location from which the Red Skull would launch his first and final strike against the US, Tony found himself getting more and more anxious. Much to his irritation, he wasn't sure why.

"You okay, Tony?" Cap asked him when he fidgeted visibly for the third time in as many minutes. After all, he normally did his best not to show his emotions on his sleeve.

"Just on edge," he bit out. "Something about this mission feels wrong, and I'm not sure what."

Barnes gave him a long level look. "You figure it out," he said firmly, "you speak up."

Gabe nodded. "Your instincts are good," he agreed, "and I feel it, too. Might just be that I don't like trusting Zola's intel, but..."

The others nodded, too, more or less in unison.

"Ce miserable ver de terre," Dernier spat derisively.

"For now, we'll proceed as planned, with caution," Cap decided. "I didn't notice anything obviously wrong, but I'm not going to just ignore your instincts. And you're right that Zola is the last person we should blindly trust, after everything he's done."

Everyone nodded solemnly. Dugan settled his hat more firmly on his head, and put in his two cents, "I'm not sure caution will be enough, Captain, but it's the best we can do."

Silence reigned for the rest of the flight.

Tony swallowed back his lingering apprehension as best he could. He'd have preferred to just abort the mission, but even if it was a trap, they couldn't turn back now. They couldn't take the chance that Zola's information had been accurate. There was no time to arrange a second attempt before Red Skull would allegedly launch his attack.

\------

The team had operated in flawless unison from the moment they'd gotten to the base until they'd reached the massive hangar containing Red Skull's secret weapon.

As soon as they'd entered the base proper, JARVIS' alerts had started to come in a constant low level stream, and Tony'd had his hands full covering the team's collective backs.

"Sir, squad approaching from the south," his AI opened, and Tony simply stopped in his tracks. He turned to face the indicated direction and waited. The rest of the Commandos took a few steps before they realised he'd stopped and why.

"Dernier," Cap decided, "take cover to Tony's 7 o'clock and help him. The rest of you are sticking with me. We'll keep an eye on the remaining approaches and help as needed. For now, just keep out of sight."

A quiet chorus of ayes answered him, and the Commandos dispersed. Tony grinned, appreciating the strategy. He was free to be as flashy as he wanted if all of them were behind cover. The HYDRA squad would only find him here, alone. They would likely underestimate him, unless rumours of the armour's existence had spread faster than expected. And if he was in danger of getting overwhelmed, the Commandos would help him out.

The squad of ten men rushed into the hallway and fanned out.

Tony gave them enough time to ready their weapons -- he wanted to know if any of them were carrying the glowy rayguns that had knocked him out of the air last time -- then launched himself at them. There were two with the rayguns, and Tony focused on them first. He fired his thrusters just long and hard enough to send himself a foot into the air, then let himself fall forward until he was flying right at them. With a whoop, he used his palm repulsors to blast the weapons out of their hands, then knock them out. An instant later he was physically ploughing right through them, sending the men with normal guns scattering.

It took him some complicated maneuvering to stop his forward momentum, but when he managed, throwing himself into a tight turn no one else could have pulled off, including Rhodey, Tony turned back to the last few stunned foot soldiers still standing. Three repulsor blasts dealt with them. He knocked out the groaning men on the floor of the corridor. They didn't need to kill the men but making sure none of them came back to attack them again was a high priority.

Dernier stood and laughed. "Bien fait," he commented, then slapped at Tony's shoulder and sauntered farther down the corridor to rejoin the rest of the Commandos.

Tony took a deep breath, and followed, letting the adrenaline bleed out of him slowly. He'd need to conserve his strength as much as he could; cleaning out this base would be an endurance race, not a sprint.

After that, the HYDRA foot soldiers had come at them in waves, squad after squad, and company after company. In the narrow corridors of the base, that had made the assault more or less manageable.

The tight quarters had worked against the HYDRA men more than against the Commandos, in that it limited the number of HYDRA soldiers that could attack them at any one time. Many of them had been carrying the strange rayguns that Tony hadn't had a chance to analyse, but it had quickly become clear that the HYDRA soldiers were reluctant to fire the energy weapons when they knew they might hit their allies. Cap had taken care of the rest, carving his way through the opposition and letting the Commandos back him up.

Following their Captain's lead, the Commandos had efficiently worked their way down the corridors, taking ground and not giving the HYDRA soldiers a chance to regroup. After that encounter with the first squad, Tony had taken up a position at the rear of the group, deciding he'd be most useful keeping an eye on their backs until he was needed anywhere else. Indoors, he couldn't take full advantage of his ability to fly, but he could take out any foot soldiers that tried to flank them.

After an indeterminate length of time that fell somewhere between 5 minutes and 5 hours, they'd reached their goal: the area of the base housing the weaponry the Red Skull intended to deploy.

That had turned out to be a massive hangar and its adjacent work areas, containing a bomber larger than any the Allied Command could currently field. The HYDRA bomber, christened the Valkyrie, had also been surrounded by crowds of HYDRA foot soldiers, more than half of them armed with those rayguns that had knocked Tony out of the sky not that long ago.

"We can't let them launch that bomber," Cap had called to the rest of them as the HYDRA foot soldiers rushed at them, and then they hadn't had time to talk much. The conversation had been limited to tactics and commands.

Tony himself had gotten through most of that fight without getting hit hard enough to go down again, and his repulsor blasts had helped the rest of the Commandos cut a path to that bomber.

Just as they'd succeeded, though, everything had gone sideways.

The bomber's engines had started with a loud whine, betraying that they were jets -- which, Tony's mind supplied uselessly, hadn't been widespread in commercial aviation until the 60s, at the earliest, though during this war the German jet fighters had been a force to be reckoned with [[wikipedia link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_aircraft)] -- and a low roar had risen underneath, as a set of rockets mounted to the wings had lit. Rocket-assisted takeoff.

How in Tesla's name had the Red Skull gotten his hands on that tech? It shouldn't have been possible.

In his distraction, Tony took a hard hit from one of the rayguns held by the foot soldiers still taking potshots at him as he dazedly worked out how the bomber could even take to the air. Going down with a surprised yelp, he fired back with his repulsors.

Before he had been able to get back to his feet -- or into the air, for that matter -- he'd seen the plane's wheels start turning as it began rolling toward the end of the runway and open air.

"Shit!" Gabe had sworn in response to this new development, and said something that made Tony's blood run cold, "Cap and Sarge are aboard that thing!"

"And we're not," Dugan had agreed, sounding like he wanted to turn the air blue, himself, "but we can't catch it! Tony! Go after the morons, will you?"

A beat later, a grenade had flown in from his left, and Tony had reflexively covered his face with his arm, despite the intimate knowledge that the armour could take far harder hits. So had the HYDRA foot soldiers surrounding him and keeping him pinned down.

When the blast had gone off, the shock of it had left him momentarily breathless, but the crowd of HYDRA men around him had gotten knocked off their feet, either out cold or dead. "Thanks, Dernier," he'd called, and picked himself up, already doing the math. He might be able to catch the bomber if he pushed his bootjets a little. He couldn't carry the two idiots back, but he might be able to reroute the bomber toward--

His boot repulsors had sputtered sadly, though, and refused to lift him even an inch into the air. Something was broken and he didn't have the time to fix it and still get to the bomber. "Motherfucker! I'm grounded. Can't fly," he'd shouted back to Dugan, mind racing as he desperately tried to salvage the situation. "Falsworth! We need to call Stark and Agent Carter!"

\------

By the time Falsworth had gotten through to Howard and Peggy, guarded by the rest of the Commandos and Tony, nearly an hour had gone by. When he finally did, Peggy's clear voice came down the line almost immediately, the snap of command in her voice making Tony stand straighter in his armour.

"Captain," she demanded, "give me a status report!"

"Well," Cap replied, a tired rasp in his voice clear to hear, and the loud rush of turbulent air in the background trying to render his words indistinct, "we've dealt with the Skull, but this bomber isn't responding to our attempts to redirect it. There's about fifteen massive tesseract bombs in the belly of the plane, meant for pretty much every major city in the US and southern Canada."

The very idea -- a massive bomber capable of crossing the Atlantic loaded down with tesseract-powered bombs intended to wipe out whole cities throughout the North American continent, from New York to Toronto to Chicago and Los Angeles -- sent a visceral shudder through Tony, and made goosebumps rise on his whole body. It would be Hiroshima and Nagasaki, times fifteen. And potentially have even more devastating consequences. The US would be leveled, economically, and its ability to fight the war pretty much obliterated. Along with about half its population. If those bombs hit American soil, the US could very well be wiped off the map. Without its major cities -- among them its major financial and industrial centers -- there would be no way the country could survive. It wouldn't be able to defend itself or pay for anything, and the remaining citizens would be in an absolute panic.

As strategies went, it was brutally effective. Far moreso than taking out Washington DC. Simply getting rid of the politicians with a very visible strike was great as symbolic blows, propaganda, and fear tactics went, but crippling the nation's infrastructure and supply lines? Tony felt another shudder go through him at the thought.

Everyone taking part in the war effort, from the lowest supply officer all the way up to Patton himself more or less took those things for granted in their planning, both here and Stateside. The assumption that the banks and factories back home would keep operating underlay literally every move they made. The Armed Forces and the Allies were used to securing those vital lines of communication and material, once the supplies got aboard ship and made their way to the European Continent. But they didn't really put much stock in the idea of being struck at home. Things like the Manhattan Project and the critical munitions factories and shipyards were camouflaged and protected, but the Red Skull's plan didn't care about those.

"Give us half an hour, and we'll find you a place to land," Peggy told him. "Howard's on his way and he's bringing half his team."

"There's no time! We're gonna have to put her down in the water!" Cap disagreed, all but shouting over the radio, fighting to make himself understood over the roar of the air rushing through the bomber.

"No!" Agent Carter sounded absolutely anguished, and Tony suddenly _knew_ exactly what was about to happen with a bone deep certainty. He'd heard her tell this story a few times, and she never quite managed to do it dry-eyed. "Don't you dare do that, Steven Rogers!"

"Peggy," Cap replied, almost gently, "we have no other choice. We can't be sure that we'll be able to land this thing without the bombs going off, and we can't let it reach the US coast."

"Don't be so hasty, Howard will know what to do. Damn that man! Where is he!"

Silence reigned briefly, and the Commandos all turned to stare at him. Tony winced. They'd guessed the truth.

"They aren't going to make it, are they." Morita said. It wasn't a question.

Tony took off his helmet and tucked it under his arm, his head bowing and his shoulders slumping. "No, they aren't," he said, not sure if he meant Cap and Sarge, or Howard and Peggy. But then, it didn't matter, now, did it?

"Guess we'd better get home and get ready for a rescue mission, then," Dugan said, taking charge. "Come on, fellas."

Tony could have told him it would be fruitless.

He kept his mouth shut.


	10. Chapter 10

"Damn everything," Howard swore at his improvised vibranium detector. "It doesn't work. Why doesn't it work?"

Tony wanted to throw a spanner at his dad. He was forced to do the math and the designs for his time machine without JARVIS, since he couldn't wear the armour in the workshop. That meant it had taken him longer than originally projected, but he was _this close_ to finding his way home, and -- like Howard's project -- it just _wasn't working_.

"Have you tried reversing the polarity?" He asked, not really giving a flying fuck what he was saying, but just asking the question to distract Howard.

"That's brilliant!" Howard shouted at him, and grabbed him by the forearm. "Come help me with the recalibrations!"

Tony made a noise of protest, but Howard had enough momentum to bodily haul him up out of his chair, so Tony found himself being dragged away from his continued attempts to get home and over toward Howard's workbench.

"Reversing the polarity should increase the resonance of the detector's signal with the shield Rogers carries," Howard rambled, "and I don't know how you figured that out without even looking at my design. But I don't really care, either."

It had been a very half-assed Star Trek joke, but weirdly enough when he looked at his dad's design, it seemed to actually work. Rather to Tony's surprise. He decided against telling Howard what he'd actually meant. "You could also try just raising the factor of the op-amp between the detector and the sensor," he offered, "if signal strength is a problem. It would mean more noise to filter, but you'd have a better detection rate."

Howard hummed agreement, but kept working on what he was doing. Tony recognized the level of focus as on par with one of his own engineering binges and left the man to it.

And, for that matter, he snorted, maybe he should try applying the same principle to his own work. "Reverse the polarity," he muttered to himself. "For fuck's sake. Could it be that simple?"

He and JARVIS had figured out that, throughout his stay in the past, his arc reactor had continued generating tachyons with the same polarity and frequency as the ones in the initial burst produced by the particle accelerator in his basement.

That meant, on a practical level, that if he could find a way to reverse the polarity of the reactor's cycles, and thus also the tachyons it was producing, he should be able to get home.

Now that history was back in its previous course -- as far as he knew, anyway -- he could leave without causing too many ripples. Well, if he got his prototype working. He couldn't remember anything else happening differently in his timeline.

\------

It didn't take him long to work out how to make his adjustments after that.

Tony left for home without bothering to say any goodbyes. There was little point; the Commandos were all preoccupied with their search for Cap and Sarge, and so were Howard, Peggy, and Phillips. Not one of them would miss him, really. None of them had bothered to say a word to him in the aftermath of the disaster of the mission a week ago.

There was nothing holding him back.

So he went. There had been another purely logistical problem to resolve before he flipped the switch, that had taken him a few days to solve in a halfway practical way: it would take a big amount of tachyons to shove him back through the spacetime continuum to his own time, and the reactor would take literal decades to produce them if he didn't give it a boost.

Tony finished his calculations, triple checked them, then got JARVIS to help him implement the changes. He'd had to use the tech lying around in his dad's workshop to improvise a way to amplify the low levels of tachyon production that the reactor was still maintaining.

The device he'd cobbled together was bulky and looked more like a mass of tangled wires and components than anything else. The effect was a bit like looking at an old generator through a funhouse mirror. But, then, Tony thought with a silent huff, he didn't give a flying fuck what it looked like, as long as it worked. He didn't have his integrated circuit components or machine shop to work with, here, after all. Working with wiring, vacuum tubes and all the rest of it had been an interesting exercise, but he wasn't overly enamoured with the lack of durability that the components lent the final product. The vacuum tubes in particular were prone to failing under impact or heavy load. He wouldn't be able to pour large amounts of power through it easily, and he'd have to be careful not to drop or bump it while he made his way to the spot he'd picked out for his attempt.

\------

It had been annoying to haul his device and his armour out of the camp and to a nearby sheltered spot in the dense forest. Wearing his armour had made it difficult to carry the thing, thanks to the lack of grip pads on his gauntlets, and he'd had a few moments of panicked scrambling when his fingers had briefly slipped. Each one had left him clutching it tightly to his chest for a few seconds before he kept walking.

When he deemed it safe enough to flip the switch without accidentally hauling along any uninvited passengers -- or attracting undue attention if this failed -- Tony set down his device and activated his armour.

"Sir?" JARVIS sounded vaguely apprehensive. "We have not run all the simulations necessary to--"

"JARV," Tony cut him off. "The sims are only so good. We won't know if it works without actually trying it."

Connecting the device to his chest piece made him swallow back some apprehension. "You ready for this, J?"

"No, Sir, but since you are set on it, I doubt I have much choice." His AI sniped back.

The device ramped up and a high whine almost beyond the limits of Tony's hearing rose. "Sorry, buddy, but there's no other way forward."

Before JARVIS could reply, there was another bright flash, like the one that had propelled him back in time, and Tony felt the ground disappear under his feet.

At least this time he was already in his armour.

\------

His calculations were slightly off, as it turned out. Tony blamed it on the fact that he'd had to learn how to use a sliderule on the spot, once he'd really started seriously working on his tachyon amplifier.

Rather than landing at the moment he'd disappeared, Tony found himself face-to-face with himself, Romanov, and Fury in some warehouse somewhere. His other self looked tired, Tony saw, and those were definitely some bruises mostly hidden under makeup. Fury and Natashalie had drawn weapons immediately, though they hadn't fired.

"Care to tell us who you are," Fury asked him. Tony watched himself reach for a second suitcase suit.

Tony thought fast. If he told them, that would cause a lot of trouble. If he didn't, he'd be stuck in a SHIELD cell for who knew how long, and his other self would probably attack him. "Not really," he said airily, and popped open the faceplate, "but I'm pretty sure you already know, so that's okay."

All three of them did a beautiful double take.

"Holy fuck, what--" his other self started, then broke off. "Oh. That's when I am. Okay. You're a few days late to the party."

Figured. Tony shrugged, eyeing Natashalie warily. "Gonna help me get where I need to be?" He asked himself.

His future self laughed, a trifle ruefully. "Might as well. You have free access to all my stuff anyway. I might as well come watch."

Fury scowled at them. "You are not getting out of explaining this, Stark," he growled.

"Whatever," his other self waved that away. "Just get me that favor I asked for, and we're quits for now. I'll tell you all about this some other day."

Tony didn't bother trying to work out how this would change after he'd gotten back those few days he needed to. This conversation was going to go differently next time, after all.

\------

Once he'd gotten to his own workshop, it took almost no time to finish syncing the designs he'd kept JARVIS saved in his armour's onboard memory and nowhere else.

The workshop looked almost as he'd left it, those few days ago, and his future self looked around as he strolled in, preceding Tony. "Yeah," he quipped, "it's still a mess, but we got the job done."

He hadn't seen the full extent of the damage he'd done to the place thanks to the bright flash as the tachyons had hit him, but now it was obvious. The scorch marks on the walls he'd expected to see, but the contents of his work cabinet were strewn across the floor, along with the upper half of said cabinet. The shelves beside it had suffered a similar fate. The particle accelerator had yet to be dismantled, and still occupied nearly all of the floorspace.

"Sir?" JARVIS sounded wary. "Are my sensors malfunctioning or are you truly here twice?"

Chuckling, Tony reached out and made the gesture requesting that his AI bring up a holointerface. "Only temporary, buddy. I'll be back out of your hair is soon as I can."

Nothing happened, and future him snorted. "You know, we could probably publish about ten papers about this if it weren't the most classified thing ever." He said, repeating the gesture to bring up the holointerface. That time, JARVIS complied.

After that, updating the design of his device and upping its precision took under half an hour. Having access to his design suite and JARVIS' computing power made all sorts of things easier, and sped up the rest.

His future self caught his eyes and gave him a wry smirk. "Go get 'em. Try not to get Vanko killed, if you can avoid it. His suit overloaded in my go around because the idiot used shitty Hammertech parts. I want to sue him for anything I can make stick, and I'll bet you will, too."

Tony couldn't help his surprised chuckle. "Right."

\------

Staring down at the Expo Park, parts of it on fire and most of the rest otherwise mangled or destroyed by the Hammertech drones, Tony winced. He hadn't been able to avoid killing Vanko, despite his best efforts, but Rhodey was fine, no one had been injured in the attack besides him, and he'd gotten Pepper out in time. Overall, a win.

Pepper stepped shakily up beside him, and stared down at the destruction. "Tony," she managed, then trailed off almost helplessly.

Carefully, he pulled her into a hug. "Pep," he told her, "it'll be alright. Come on, we'll get dinner and sleep, and tackle this tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? _Tomorrow_ , Tony? The press is already all over this, and I hear the news choppers arriving. It can't wait that long, and I--" Pepper's voice cut off in a pained hiss as she put too much of her weight on her left ankle.

"You need medical attention," he told her. "Leave the press to me."

Pepper made another pained sound, and Tony wasn't sure if it was in response to what he'd said or her injury. "That'll be a disaster," she said as he scooped her up in his arms to carry her back down from the rooftop. Pepper's arms automatically went around his neck, and she went on, "if you expect me to allow that, you're taking Natalie with you to the press conference."

Tony sniffed at her and gently took to the air. "I do that, and you let me take you on a real date," he bargained on a whim. They'd been dancing around the issue for a long time, and he'd just very nearly gotten stuck almost 70 years in the past. He carefully didn't let himself think about Sarge or the Cap. As attractive as that mental image had always been, right from the moment he'd overheard them in the showers -- he'd thought about it a lot -- he'd known better than to let himself do more than dream. There had been no way it could ever happen. Barnes had been completely correct on that score.

And he was pretty sure he did love Pepper.

\------

The two of them lasted all of a month, to Tony's disappointment.

Both of them had tried, but the logistics of maintaining a relationship between a Fortune 100 company CEO and a superhero were just too ridiculous. If they actually found enough time in their schedules that coincided and tried to spend it together, there was always some emergency or other that cropped up to rob them of the chance. Either Pepper had to spend most of it on the phone straightening out whatever legal, bureaucratic, or logistical snarls, or he got called out to put out a different sort of fire with his armour.

It didn't take either of them long to get frustrated with this state of affairs, but it was Pepper who eventually voiced her dissatisfaction one night when they had actually managed to spend an hour cuddled together on the wide sofa of his penthouse suite.

"Tony?"

"Hmm?" He knew he sounded distracted, but he was trying to work out how to eke a little more power out of his boot thrusters. He could have used it on his last mission, and--

"This isn't working."

Blinking he set his designs aside for a second. "What isn't?"

"Us," Pepper sighed. "Our lives are just too complicated. Every time we try to have a date, our jobs force us away again."

Tony unconsciously pulled her tighter against him, but he couldn't refute that. "So what do you want, Pep?"

"I don't know." She ran one hand through his hair, then let it rest against his jaw. "I want it to work, but unless we both give up our jobs, I don't think it can. And neither of us is willing to do that."

\------

In an attempt to distract himself from the weirdness of going from friends to lovers-who-had-no-time and back to friends, Tony threw himself headlong into solving the mystery his dad never quite had: finding Cap and Sarge.

After so many years, there was no way they were still alive, but they deserved to be recovered and buried with all the honors due to them.

With the tech at his disposal, it didn't actually take that long to find the bodies. Howard hadn't managed because of the limits of his scanners and detectors, while Tony had the advantage of his satellite network and JARVIS. The technically difficult part had been configuring the satellite networks to detect vibranium, and to be able to do it through any kind of material.

After all, Cap and Sarge had been inside a plane when they'd gone down, and all that steel and aluminum would muffle the signal of the vibranium shield. And who knew where they'd gone down. They could be at the bottom of the Atlantic, buried in ice, or potentially even under who knew how many tons of sand and rock.

Once he'd solved that problem -- which he needed about a month to solve to his satisfaction -- it didn't take him more than a week to locate what he was pretty sure was the correct wreckage. The size was about right for the Valkyrie, and there were some strange energy signatures aboard that were likely the bombs Cap had mentioned during that last emotion-wracked radio call.

Tony suited up and went out to survey the site. Four hours later, he was staring down at the wreckage of the Valkyrie. He almost wanted to laugh. Finding it on the first try felt like it had been far too easy, somehow, but he wasn't going to question good luck.

After he'd blasted away the layer of ice between him and the Valkyrie's fuselage, and used his cutting lasers to get through the thick aluminum skin, he'd found himself in a cavernous cockpit with huge shattered bay windows that felt a bit like a fish tank.

What he found inside said cockpit was enough to make him want to scream at the two morons.

The wreckage of the huge bomber was more or less intact, and the bombs hadn't gone off, despite the team's fears when Cap and Sarge had crashed it. Seawater had rushed in -- through the broken cockpit windows, no doubt -- as the plane crashed through the arctic ice, leaving the Cap and Barnes trapped inside the somewhat mangled fuselage, and then frozen around them. They'd very literally gone down with the ship, and apparently wrapped themselves around one another for comfort as they drowned, before getting turned into icicles and preserved for eternity.

Digging the two of them out of their icy prison took Tony a few hours. Luckily, thanks to the buoyancy of their bodies, they'd ended up near the surface of the ice, but even so it wasn't an easy matter to cut them free and then get the ice block around them small enough that he could lift it back out through the hole he'd cut to get in. By the time he'd managed, the perpetual daylight of late summer was beginning to get obscured by an unexpected storm.

The gusts of wind whipped the thin layer of loose snow up into the air, lowering the visibility and making it dangerous to fly, let alone while he carried an unwieldy burden such as this one promised to be. It was difficult enough to fly when he only had one passenger and said passenger could hold onto him. This could potentially be harrowing. Trying to fly and maneuver with a huge block of ice in his arms? During the beginnings of a storm?

Tony's jaw tightened. He wasn't going to give up now. He owed it to them and to Aunt Peggy to finish what he'd started here.

He cut handholds for himself into the block of ice, making sure they were in places where the ice was thickest, then gingerly hit his thrusters. He had to push them almost to a quarter of their capacity before his burdened suit finally lifted off the ground. Once he was in the air, he immediately overbalanced, and nearly face planted on the ice. His second attempt went a bit more smoothly.

The trip back to his Tower took a lot longer than the trip out had, and there were several moments where he fought not to lose his grip on Cap and Sarge. As he flew, the friction of the air melted the outer surface of the ice block in his arms and made it slippery.

By the time he'd gotten them home, he was exhausted, both mentally and physically, and he ached all over.

"Well," he asked the frozen pair, as he set them on the floor of his workshop, facedown, "now what?"


	11. Chapter 11

"You what?" Fury sounded like Tony'd just slapped him in the face with a fish.

Tony laughed, the sound harsh and probably telegraphing his exhaustion. "I found Captain America and Sergeant Barnes, and they're frozen solid. I don't have the facilities to thaw them out. You do. So here's the deal. You get them out of their ice block and do the press, they get an honorable burial. No experiments or dissections. They deserve that much."

"I swear to God, Stark," the Director of SHIELD growled at him, "you are a bigger pain in my ass than any three of my departments. Combined."

"I'll take that as a compliment," Tony sniped back. "Do we have a deal or not?"

"No need for a deal." Fury snorted. "You think I want to take the heat for desecrating the bodies of a pair of national heroes? Fuck no. Bring your icicles over."

\------

Tony didn't hang around to supervise after he'd handed over the pair of bodies. He might not trust Fury, or SHIELD in general, but Fury was right about the fact that the social and political consequences of cutting up either Cap or Sarge would be immense, if it got out. Tony intended to make sure it would, if they did, and he made sure Fury knew it.

The call he got at 3:24 am two days later, though, that was a surprise.

"Get your ass over here, Stark," Fury said shortly, "we need to have a long talk about withholding of information."

Not sure what the hell Fury was angry about this time, Tony sent Pepper and Rhodey emails to let them know where he was going. In the unlikely event that he disappeared into the bowels of SHIELD's HQ and didn't get back out, he wanted someone to know how to get Fury to cough him up.

He might still be a bit sore that Rhodey had let the military and Hammer fuck around with the War Machine suit, but that was on the Air Force brass, really. Not Rhodey himself. Tony knew that the orders had to have come down from on high, which meant Rhodey couldn't refuse or he'd have lost control of the War Machine armour entirely.

For that matter, Tony noted, maybe he should tell them both the story of his trip through time. Neither of them knew that he'd even been gone. Not even Natashalie knew. He never mentioned it in their attempt to 'debrief' him after the showdown he'd had with Vanko at the Expo.

He hadn't said anything to Pepper or Rhodey yet because he didn't want them to think he was high or totally insane.

\------

Half an hour later, Tony wanted to laugh. Again. He bit back the urge, knowing it would sound more than a little bit hysterical if he let himself. What the fuck was his life even?

The pair of idiots was alive somehow, and asking after their team, as the Widow informed him. Apparently his name had come up indirectly a few times, as well, once they'd recovered enough to figure out where they were and pry a date out of one of the medics poking and prodding at them, prompting Fury to haul him to HQ. She'd met him in the lobby of the large building, and escorted him through the bland corridors, taking him directly to where he wanted to go. That worked out well for both of them; she didn't have to corral Tony anywhere, and he didn't have to fight to get where he wanted to go. As they walked, she read him in on the situation. Well. Part of it. Tony was sure she'd withheld at least half of what she knew. Possibly more.

The upshot was that, for some reason, Fury had decided that telling them what had happened was Tony's job. Probably in revenge for the way Tony had dumped the task of thawing them on SHIELD.

That was about to backfire on Fury in a big way. Tony shook his head at his own thoughts. It would probably backfire on him, too, in some way or other. That much was almost guaranteed, Tony reflected as he paused outside the room.

The door of the room the Cap and Sarge were in, in the medical wing of the building, suddenly loomed in front of him, and Tony paused to straighten his shoulders and take a steadying breath. He had no idea what shape the pair of them were in, let alone what they remembered, but that wasn't going to change if he stood out here and ignored the problem.

No time like the present, right?

The sight that met his eyes, though, when he took in the room... That was another shock. The two men had been sitting on one of the hospital beds, half dressed, with their shoulders pressed together as they stared down at a tablet and muttered at each other about Google.

They'd looked up when the door opened, and Barnes had eyed him suspiciously for a moment as he'd stepped into the room, obviously expecting a SHIELD grunt, then his eyes had widened. "Tony?" he asked incredulously.

Cap had set aside the tablet they'd been laboriously poking at, surprised, and stood, staring openly at him. Barnes followed suit, grinning broadly.

"Hey Cap, Sarge," Tony offered them a crooked smile. "Welcome to the future."

"You got home, then," Cap said with a nod, standing. "And this is it?"

"It is. Been a few months since I got back." Tony nodded to the tablet, "I take it SHIELD is getting you up to speed?"

Barnes snorted. "They didn't want to tell us anything at first. It took us an hour to force them to even give us the date. That was apparently their breaking point. They handed us one of those... tablets? And then ran off to call someone. I guess that someone was you."

"Looks that way." Tony shrugged. "They told me you wanted to know what happened to the team."

Cap held up the tablet. "We found a few of them ourselves. This Google of yours is a useful thing."

Tony laughed. "It lies as often as it tells the truth, Cap," he offered. "They got you on any kind of medical observation?"

"They gave up on that a few hours ago," Barnes replied. "Something about us both reaching stable baseline values, whatever that means."

"Come on, then. I'm breaking you out of here," Tony urged them to their feet. "They feed you yet? I'm craving some Thai."

"Thai?" Cap sounded a bit unsure. The brief pause after his question was broken by his stomach growling.

Sarge laughed at him. "Come on, Steve. I don't even care what it is, at this point, as long as it's food."

Tony turned toward the door. "Follow my lead, and I'll get you some food. New York's changed a little since your day, but it's still got great restaurants. I'll tell you about the rest of the team over breakfast."

\------

The conversation about the team went over rather better than Tony had expected. The pair of them had nodded with each new piece of information he'd offered as though it had been exactly what they'd expected to hear.

Steve had gotten a solemn sad look every time he found out that his old friends had died or suffered some sort of other misfortune. That Peggy was still around had seemed to reach deep down into him and light him up, though. "She's here in DC?"

"Close enough for government work," Tony replied and nodded. "At a nursing home in the suburbs. I don't have time to visit her much."

Bucky eyed him shrewdly. "She was more to you than just an acquaintance," he said, tone mild.

"Yeah, she was." Tony shrugged. "Still is. We're not related, but she was my Aunt Peggy. Running SHIELD kept her really busy, though, so I didn't get to see her nearly as much as I wanted. Not until SHIELD forced her to retire. Her free time and mine didn't overlap much, though. That was about a year before I inherited the company from Howard. I lost touch with her for a while, after I took over as CEO."

Barnes huffed, looking bemused. "Well, that explains a lot."

Steve stared at him. "Wait, you're Howard's son?"

A short silence reigned at their little table. "Yeah," Tony shrugged. "Not that he ever seemed to care about that."

Steve stared down at his empty plate. Tony was about to ask him if he wanted anything else to eat, when Bucky cut him off. "Let's go visit Peggy."

Surprised, Steve's head shot up. "What? Now?"

"Sure, now. When? Next year?" Barnes' voice all but dripped sarcasm. "Tony, you're comin' with us."

"We've had this argument before, Barnes," Tony drawled, willing to go with the change in subject, even if he wasn't sure it was one he liked. "I'm not part of your chain of command."

"Doesn't matter. Come visit her. Show us where she's at and visit her yourself," Barnes argued.

He really should. Tony rolled his eyes and made a face at Barnes, but he gave in. Pulling his phone out of his blazer pocket, he checked the time. If they left now, they might just make it there in time for visiting hours to start.

\------

The orderly at the front desk took one look at them and came to attention. Tony decided she was probably SHIELD-issue. "Captain, sir! Sergeant! We weren't expecting you!"

Tony raised an eyebrow at her. "What? I don't rate a hello?"

"I've met you before, Stark." She retorted, and Steve chuckled.

A pair of autographs, introductions, and a few starstruck minutes of awkward conversation later, they were on their way again. Tony tuned out almost everything that was said, preferring to fire off a few text messages. He had five missed calls from Pepper, which meant she was going to send Happy after him soon to physically track him down using the signal from his phone and suitcase suit. They both got really angry with him when they ended up doing that for no reason.

That social duty done quickly, and lectures avoided, he settled in to toy with a random set of schematics while Cap and Barnes tried to extract themselves gracefully from the clutches of... Tony realised he didn't remember the agent's name. Whatever.

Somehow, it didn't take them as long as Tony had half expected, and then they were on their way again. "Forgot how much I hate that," Steve muttered under his breath as they got out of the agent's earshot.

Bucky huffed at him, amused. "Thought you were used to it."

"If not, he better get used to it," Tony put in. "And you too, Sarge. You're both national icons, now."

Steve rolled his eyes. "Great."

Silence reigned for the rest of the short walk out to Peggy's room, but somehow it wasn't awkward, and Tony was thankful for the chance to try to get his thoughts in order. He hadn't seen Peggy since before Obie had tried to kill him two years and change ago, and even then her memories had been starting to fade. Odds were good that it had only worsened in the last two years.

When he stopped in front of her door, Tony took a careful deep breath, steeling himself and squaring his shoulders. Barnes' hand landed on the back of his shoulder, then, and Tony jumped. "What? Barnes--"

"It'll be fine," Barnes cut him off, keeping his voice low. "Come on."

"I know you're out there," Peggy called, interrupting them both. "Just open the door and let me see you."

"Damn it," Tony grumbled, then twisted at the knob and pushed the door open, feeling vaguely like he was flying headfirst into a hail of enemy fire, or maybe falling out of the sky, out of control.

"Anthony Edward Stark," Peggy started, "you'd best-- oh."

Her words cut off when Steve stepped into the room behind Tony, stunned surprise overtaking her momentary anger at Tony. "Steve," she breathed, slowly pushing herself up out of her chair and reaching out to him as though he was a mirage she didn't dare touch, for fear it would vanish.

Barnes shoved Steve forward a step, rolling his eyes at everyone in the room, then firmly shut the door. "Agent Carter," he offered her his hand. "It's good to see you again."

Peggy took his hand with a smile that wobbled, and her eyes were wet with tears she wasn't allowing to fall. "You're late, Barnes."

"We couldn't call our ride," he replied, a rueful smile on his own face.

And Tony... Tony remembered that joke. He'd heard Peggy rail about Captain America and how he'd allowed his only line of communication to get shot and destroyed. Heard her complain, half-angry and half-amused, about the one liner he'd given her when he'd finally shown back up at camp with Barnes and some 400 liberated Allied soldiers in tow.

Peggy's expression did something strange, caught between laughter, joy, and irritation. "So you boys found one another again somehow, did you?" She turned back to Tony. "I expect you to explain to me why I suddenly remember you helping out the Howlies and driving Phillips up the wall, some seven decades ago. The whole truth, this time. None of those conversational tricks you used back then to get out of saying a word."

Tony gave her a shrug and a half smile. "Had an accident in the lab," he said softly. The Cap and Sarge had heard this, before, though not in any detail. "I'm still not totally sure why or how it happened, but I got hit with a hefty dose of tachyons -- those are time particles -- and they dropped me in the middle of one of the Howlies' missions. You know most of the rest already."

Peggy gave him a sharp look. "I suppose it makes sense that you didn't want to tell us who you were, then."

"And be locked up for interrogation -- which Phillips nearly did anyway -- or shipped off to a mental hospital?" Tony raised an eyebrow at her and watched her briefly struggle not to immediately refute the statement. "It was bad enough that I had to try to hide this," he added, and tapped at the reactor, "and keep the armour more or less a secret. Which, I might add, you didn't exactly help with, marching me through the base, like you did."

"And what is that, exactly?" Peggy frowned at him, then pointed imperiously at the small table for four tucked away between her window and the tiny kitchenette. "Sit."

Barnes followed suit when Tony somewhat reluctantly settled himself in a chair. Peggy turned to Steve. "And you," she gave him a glare and jabbed at his chest with a forefinger, "you're not getting out of telling your side of the story, either. Sit with them; I'm going to put on some tea."

Watching Cap and Sarge defer to Peggy, just as they always had outside of battle or tactical discussions, Tony bit back his amusement. After that, the three of them sat in silence for a couple of minutes that seemed to drag, waiting for the kettle to boil and Peggy to pour tea for all of them. When she was settled, she fixed Tony with a sharp look. "Talk."

Tony swallowed back as much of the emotion that tried to rise up and choke him as he could. "Well," he started, "you know how you always said Obie was a snake?" He paused as Barnes and Cap gave him startled looks. He hadn't ever told them about that. Right. Tony shrugged and went on, "you were right."

Peggy looked murderous. "What. Happened."

"He sold me out and I got this for a souvenir," Tony said as airily as he could manage, tapping at the reactor again.

Peggy pointed at him with her teacup. "Tony, stop evading."

Barnes' hand landed on his shoulder again. Tony forced down the shudder and the memories that brought up, even as he shied away from the touch. Having a heavy hand right there where Obie had used to--

"Tony?" Cap sounded concerned, and Tony realised he was probably freaking them all out a bit.

Taking a hitching breath, Tony shook his head. "'M fine. Just trying not to think about it too hard," he managed. Shoving the memories back in their box again as best he could, he told Peggy, "Obie sent me to Afghanistan to demo a new missile system about two years ago. On the way home, the convoy got ambushed. I didn't know it at the time, but that was Obie's doing. I was held there for three months, and that's when I got this. It's a miniaturised arc reactor." The memories rose up again, trying to lodge in his throat and choke him. "I've still got shrapnel in me, thanks to that little business trip, and if I lose the reactor, it'll kill me. It's a big magnet, keeping the shrapnel from doing anything… but it's also a lot more than that. The reactor was what got me out, in the end. Built the first version of the suit there and powered it with my new magnet." Tony went silent for a beat and took a breath, doing what he could to steady himself. "When I got home, Obie tried again. The news never got the details. They all thought he died in a plane crash or some nonsense. SHIELD's doing. I had to kill him to keep him from killing me."

The low growl coming from Barnes caught Tony off guard, and he turned to face the Sarge. "That shoulder used to be Obie's favourite," he offered, by way of oblique explanation of his reaction to the touch. "I also... don't try to hand me things. It's a-- I can't... I don't."

"It's okay," Cap put in, his voice steady and reassuring.

Tony nodded. He could tell Cap thought saying that wasn't nearly enough, but didn't dare touch him for fear of setting him off again. Barnes looked as murderous as Peggy, now.

Tony cleared his throat. "Anyway. After that got sorted out, I redesigned the suit, and things were fine for a while. Then the reactor started poisoning me. Took a while to fix that, and once I finally did, I was back in the '40s."

Cap made a vaguely amused sound. "I'd be tempted not to believe you, but after what I saw during the War it's not even that crazy."

Barnes cleared his own throat and put in. "I'm starting to think that your life is just a series of insane stunts. What the hell, Tony?"

Peggy laughed at them both, and put her hand over Tony's. The feeling, the contact was more calming than he'd thought it would be. Peggy's hand was frail and slender, but some of her strength remained, despite the way the years had done their best to wear her down. She nodded at Barnes. "It always has been. This particular stunt just happens to take the cake. Steve, be a darling and pour everyone some more tea."

She turned her attention to the other two, then, though she left her hand where it was, and Tony was grateful for the reprieve. He needed a chance to regain his composure after that little discussion. Watching her grill Cap and Sarge for details on just what had happened was interesting, too. Tony'd been expecting her to be unfocused or worse, just blankly staring at them without recognition. Instead she was acting like she had last he'd seen her for any length of time, still sharp and tracking perfectly.

"-- had no real choice, Peg," Cap was saying, more or less calm in the face of the questions Peggy was firing at him. Tony didn't doubt that if she could still fire a gun without injuring herself she might well have shot at the Cap just to prove her point. She'd done it before.

"There is always a choice," she retorted, "there was still time to try to--"

"Peg," Cap cut her off, his voice gentle, "we tried. There was no way to reroute the Valkyrie without knowing exactly how. The flight path was already set somehow, and it was flying itself. And there was no immediately obvious off switch or way to alter its path. All we could control was its altitude. At the speeds that thing was travelling, waiting for Howard to get on the horn could very easily have spelled disaster for the entire continental US and parts of Canada."

"You're incredibly lucky those bombs didn't explode on impact with the ice," Peggy rejoined, her voice wavering with the emotion she felt.

"Yeah, we know," Bucky admitted. "We were surprised as hell to wake up at all, let alone in one piece or together."

Peggy pulled a handkerchief out of some pocket and dabbed delicately at her face. "How did that come about, for that matter?"

Cap shrugged. "Tony found us, apparently. We didn't get the technical details."

"Didn't think those were relevant," Tony put in. "I decided to finish what Dad started. Dug them out of the ice and handed them over to SHIELD, since I didn't have the means to thaw them out myself. I thought we'd be laying them to rest in Arlington with honors, honestly. But instead I got a call at about 3 am this morning? Yesterday morning? Whatever. About six hours ago. Telling me that I needed to come to DC and get these two up to speed."

"And now you're here," Peggy nodded. "What's next?"

Cap and Sarge exchanged looks. "We were hoping you might have some ideas."

A slow smile crossed her face. "I'm not in the shape I once was. I can't give you the help you need, Steve. But Tony can. Get him to take you back to his fancy Tower in New York and set you up for a life in this decade. And bring him back here to visit every so often."


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus we reach the end of our story arc. I want to thank you all again for commenting and kudoing. It's been a lot of fun, and this fic got a much warmer response than I expected. :D

Rather to Tony's surprise, the pair of rescued soldiers settled into life at the Tower easily, despite -- or maybe because of -- its cutting edge tech. They'd taken JARVIS' existence in stride with surprising ease, and Tony left the two of them excitedly quizzing his AI on anything they could think of, from his dad's hovercar all the way to internet memes and what on earth those even were. He'd staggered into the elevator, headed for the privacy of his penthouse, and let his thoughts wander as he leaned tiredly against the elevator wall.

He'd led the Cap and Barnes boldly out of SHIELD HQ, and Fury hadn't caught on until they were off the grounds. There had been several angry messages left on Tony's phone, while they'd sampled one of the all-you-can eat Thai buffets nearby that Tony knew was open late, to catch the end of the hungry clubbing crowds and the very first early morning commuters.

SHIELD didn't interfere any further, though. Not then.

Nor when they'd visited Peggy.

They still hadn't. But Tony knew better than to think they never would. Fury would cash in that little debt when he felt it would be most annoying for Tony.

In the meantime, Tony was going to act like Fury had forgotten about it.

\------

Two hours after Tony had brought them back to the unoccupied apartments a few floors below his penthouse, fed until even they thought they might burst in the wake of their visit with Peggy, Pepper had breezed in. It was mid-afternoon.

Half an hour after he'd left them, Tony had, restless and unable to sleep despite his exhaustion, wandered back down to the apartment he'd more or less gifted Cap and Sarge. The two of them had watched him fling himself down to sprawl full length on their living room sofa, facedown, and not said a word about it, preferring to continue their discussion with JARVIS. Tony never registered it when he fell asleep.

The transition to wakefulness was rather more abrupt. "Sir?" JARVIS' hail pierced through the haze of sleep. Tony made a vague sound of protest, and threw an arm over his face.

"Sir," JARVIS tried again. "Ms. Potts is asking permission to enter."

That woke him up somewhat. Pepper wanted what?

"Let her in, I guess," Cap replied in his place, and Tony screwed his eyes shut. Ugh. Taking a deep breath and forcing himself into a sitting position, he scrubbed at his face with his palms. He needed to find time to shave.

"Tony," Pepper started in on him, ignoring the presence of the other two men in the room, her heels clicking loudly on the floor, "care to tell me why exactly Nick Fury has been sending me NDAs and paperwork that reads like the equivalent of a pre-nup? And maybe also why you decided to sleep down here rather than in your own apartments?"

Cap and Sarge had looked up at her entrance, and stood like the pair of gentlemen they were. "Ma'am," Cap said, a little bit at a loss.

"We'll just get out of your way," Barnes added, and started towing Cap away.

Tony watched the way Pepper's eyes lingered on them, assessing, before she shook her head. "One second." She turned back to Tony and gave him a long look. "Aren't you going to introduce your guests properly? Something tells me they're connected to this new storm of paperwork somehow."

Giving in to the necessity, Tony stood and used the movement to mask his sigh. "Pepper, these are exactly who you think they are." He pointed to them in turn. "Captain America and his Sergeant." He hesitated before he went on. "I'm pretty sure you're not still classified," he added, "but I'll let you decide if you want to give my CEO your names."

Pepper sniffed and held out her hand. "Ignore him," she said firmly. "He has no idea how social niceties work. Virginia Potts. Known to Tony as Pepper."

Barnes chuckled, and reached out to take her hand in his right and kiss her knuckles. "James Barnes, known to this punk," he elbowed Cap, "as Bucky."

"Bucky, really?" Cap grumbled at him, getting a light laugh out of Pepper, who looked charmed.

"Pleasure, Bucky," she took her hand back, then turned to the Cap. "And you are?"

"Steve Rogers, no fun nickname." He took Pepper's hand in his turn, though he didn't attempt to kiss it, like Barnes had.

Tony decided it was time he pulled the conversation back on track. "Now, why is dear old St. Nick sending me pre-nups?"

Pepper rolled her eyes at him. "I don't know," she drawled, "maybe he doesn't want you to railroad these two gentlemen into your crazy schemes."

Tony sputtered, then had to laugh, himself. "Pepper, light of my life, if anything it's more likely to be the other way around. Remind me to tell you about how I met these two morons."

"You didn't?" Cap sounded surprised.

"You remember how you reacted to the story?" Tony reminded him, wryly. "It'd be even worse here."

"Oh."

"Well, now I have to hear it," Pepper said, raising an elegant eyebrow at all three of them.

"JARV," Tony called out, "load up the recordings from my little trip into World War Two, would you?"

\------

It had taken him a while to convince Pepper that the whole thing wasn't an elaborate prank. Luckily for him, JARVIS' corroboration, Sarge's, and Cap's had helped counterbalance the insanity of the story.

They'd also insisted he call them Steve and Bucky.

Tony wasn't sure how to feel about that. It was almost as strange to think of them by their nicknames as it had been for him to meet his dad, who'd been a different person, for all intents and purposes.

He knew he'd have to consciously try to use their names rather than the nicknames history had given them. Might take him a while to get used to that.

\------

The next few days had passed quietly. Pepper had sent all of Fury's paperwork back unsigned, and forwarded copies to Tony's lawyers. That had resulted in a few more angry phone calls from Fury, but they'd ultimately had no effect. Tony wasn't sure how the Army would react to the news that Captain America was alive and well, so he'd put that problem on his law team's desk as well. They hadn't been overly happy with him, but they hadn't said no, either.

The next step had been to work out what to do. Steve and Bucky had effectively been dumped in the future, much as he'd been dumped in the past.

Tony's first response to that had been to offer to find a way to send them back. After all, if he could replicate what had happened to him with the tachyons...

They'd turned him down.

"Tony," Steve had told him, his tone somewhere between pleased and resigned, "there's nothing back there for us but more fighting."

Bucky had nodded. "We'll miss the Commandos and Peggy, but we have each other, and we're not crippled or dead. That's already more than we ever dared dream we'd get out of the War with."

Tony had to admit that logic was sound, but even he knew that emotions didn't follow logic. "Okay, but if you change your minds..."

\------

After they'd decided to stay, Tony had set JARVIS on the task of getting them valid IDs and bank accounts. Even if those accounts happened to be filled with some seed money from Tony's own.

Getting them drivers' licenses was the easiest part, and even that took upwards of a week. The DMV had denied the request he'd had JARVIS put in electronically -- Tony hadn't wanted to leave the Tower for that and risk drawing attention to his guests -- forcing him to sic one of his lawyers' interns on the problem of getting that job done without tipping people off about his guests' true identities.

Steve's face and Bucky's might not be quite as well known as his, in this era, but someone was bound to recognise them if photos appeared on Twitter. Which, with Steve's stupidly attractive jawline and impressive shoulder to hip ratio, was inevitable. His looks would get him all kinds of female attention, and things would only escalate from there. Bucky wasn't much better off, in that regard, with his clear storm grey eyes, pouty lips, and broad smile. And if he went with the two of them, that would be even worse. Sure the attention would be mostly on him, but that had consequences up to and including people speculating on why Steve and Bucky were being seen in public with Tony Stark. At the DMV no less.

Tony raked his hands through his hair. He still wasn't sure how the intern had pulled it off, but it had gotten done. He owed whichever one of them had done it a bonus. Maybe a raise.

The moment they'd gotten the licenses, thankfully without a huge media uproar to go with them, Tony had put things in motion to secure the pair of them bank accounts. He'd initially wanted to get them the accounts in their own names, then decided against it. It would be easier to make them accounts that were tied to his own, and then separate them later. It was far easier to transfer an account to someone than to create a new one, if said someone's identity was remotely in question.

"Tony," Bucky called out to him from the far side of the workshop, where he stood in the doorway, "get your ass out of that chair. Dinner's here and if we don't get a move on, we won't get any."

Standing with a groan and rolling his eyes, Tony couldn't help but be thankful for that bit of familiarity. Being on missions with two supersoldiers had sometimes led to vicious squabbles over food, when there wasn't enough to go around.

"You do know I can afford to buy enough food that we don't have to worry about that, right?"

Bucky laughed. "Where's the fun in that?"

\------

When they approached him after dinner one night about a week and a half after they'd been defrosted, Tony wasn't entirely surprised, for all that it was a bit unexpected. He'd noticed the way they watched him. The way their eyes lingered and the way they murmured to each other, breaking off anytime he got close enough to make out what they were saying. As though that didn't make it stupidly obvious that they were talking about him. Peggy had been right; neither of these two had a subtle bone in their bodies. Rather the opposite, Tony thought to himself suppressing a half-hysterical fit of laughter; neither of them was exactly _small_ , if you took his meaning.

And they made no secret about the fact that they were fucking, either. More than once, Tony'd had to bite his lip to keep from laughing at their very transparent excuses.

But none of that meant he was in the least prepared to have them invite him into their bed. He gaped at them. "You want what now?"

Steve gave him a crooked smile. "We figured out the Internet after the first day, Tony. We know you're not inexperienced. And that it's not illegal anymore. You know we're together, and that's not going to change, but we want to offer you the chance to join in the fun."

"But..." Tony watched them both warily for a long moment. "Why? Why pull me in? Sure, I'm good in bed, but relationships? I'll only fuck it all up." That much had been repeatedly proven over the course of his life. "If you know how to use Google, you'll know that I'm not kidding."

Bucky rolled his eyes at him. "Maybe you're not kidding," he agreed, "but we're not either. And we're different. You've never had a chance to have a relationship with people you knew deep down were your equals."

"And you think I see you as equals, Barnes?" Tony huffed.

"We know you do." Steve put himself shoulder-to-shoulder with Bucky. "It shows in the way you talk and act around us."

Tony tried to find something to say, and failed.

Bucky offered him a hand, as Steve wrapped an arm around Bucky's waist, the action somewhere between supportive, protective, and possessive. "What'd'ya say, Stark? In or out?"

Tony watched them for another long beat, before he gave in. "Fuck it, I've made and executed worse plans. Why not. Let's see where this goes, I guess. If it goes wrong, though, I fully intend to say 'I told you so'."

Steve huffed at him. "It won't. We won't let it."

"Do you really think you're enough of a fuck up to overcome our combined stubbornness, Stark?" Bucky raised an eyebrow at him, backing up his friend. "We fought Red Skull and survived. I doubt you can top Skull's attempts to break us up."

"That's what you say now," Tony muttered, but he let it go. After all, if they were confident enough to bet on him, that had to mean something, right?

"That's what we'll say every time," Bucky corrected him. "Unless we all decide to end it, this agreement will stay in force. And we," he caught Tony's eyes meaningfully, "will _all_ work to maintain it."

Steve nodded.

Tony smiled crookedly. "Sir, yes sir."

Startled, Bucky laughed, then reached out to take a hold of Tony's wrist and pull him in close. "Oh? _Now_ you decide that you're willing to follow the chain of command?"

"Try me." Tony gave him an arch look. "I think you'll find I'm very selective about the orders I follow."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Art for] Scientific Heresy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13602213) by [Riverlander974](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riverlander974/pseuds/Riverlander974)




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